Tyler Graf <[email protected]> writes:

> I think to make a world a better place, just simply put /media in /mnt.

> /mnt/file/(winxp,distro, img01)
> /mnt/dev/(cdrom, dvd, floppy, usb)

This is not a good idea for the reasons stated by Jeff earlier in this
thread:

>>> The main reason for /media as a separate hierarchy than /mnt is
>>> historical.  /mnt has existed for many years, and even predates Linux.
>>> Many sysadmins are accustomed to "owning" /mnt (meaning they can mount
>>> stuff there manually, create subdirectories, etc., all at their own
>>> whim).

A standard cannot reasonably reserve a particular directory for the use of
the local systems administrator, and then later impose structure beneath
it.  This *will* break people's systems that have tooling to manage /mnt
and assume that they control everything under it (and therefore, in
practice, Linux distributions just won't do this, so that part of the
standard will be disregarded).

At this point, realistically, even the "temporary" part of the FHS 2.3 has
been lost, since that can't really be enforced, plus was not always
respected in the original pre-Linux meaning of /mnt.  I know of automated
tooling that uses /mnt as the place to mount additional storage for Amazon
instances, for example (EC2 instances have a very small root partition and
additional storage has to be mounted elsewhere).

Once a standard has released a part of its namespace for local use, it
can't ever reclaim it or structure it.  That's just how standards work,
and is why one has to be fairly careful, in advance, before doing that.

Standards work is not a friendly place for people who like to clean up and
undo historical mistakes or infelicities, or organize things into clean
and simple hierarchies.  It can be quite frustrating that way.  :)

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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