On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 8:05 AM, sanjay nadkarni (Laptop) > <Sanjay.Nadkarni at sun.com> wrote: >> >> Salutations!! >> >> As part of ?Solaris Next I am proposing the following changes to /var >> hierarchy to avoid system amnesia across multiple Boot Environments. ?I >> would appreciate your feedback on caiman-discuss at opensolaris.org. > > Thinking about this, it seems to me that the sense of the proposal is the > wrong way round. > > Rather than cherry-picking a small handful of directories to be shared, > wouldn't it be better to share the whole of /var by default, and then exclude > the handful of non-shared locations? > > The reasons I believe this makes sense: > > ?- It automatically picks up new directories that aren't considered, > eliminating unpleasant surprises > > ?- It should eliminate the need for the list to be user-configurable > > ?- Looking at it, the list of non-shared locations appears to be small - > I would expect the majority of subdirectories to be shared > > ?- I expect most, if not all, of the non-shared locations to be under > the direct control of the OS (ie. packaging), so they're the ones we > know about and can manage
You seem to be suggesting that there is stuff in /var that belongs in /usr or /etc. I tend to agree but have had limited success promoting that line of thought. A quick look through a snv130 system points to the following that IMHO should be moved: /var/svc/manifest (to /etc/svc/manifest, early manifest import may be fixing this) /var/svc/profile (to /etc/svc/profile) /var/spool/cron/crontabs (to /etc/cron/crontabs) Additionally, name services (NIS, LDAP) tend to store config files that are modified through tools in /var. Those should move to /etc. I don't have a good handle on all of the files related to pkg(5), but most files other than the download cache probably belong in /etc. SMF already stores its BE-specific database under /etc/svc. This seems to be quite analogous to the installed package database. I'm not sure what to do about files and directories in /var that are deleted by an image-update while they are still needed in the running BE. Or what to do when you fall-back to the previous BE. -- Mike Gerdts http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
