Apparently, though unproven, at 20:43 on Saturday 05 February 2011, Cedric Sodhi did opine thusly:
> There are several reasons why portage, neither the tree nor (especially > not) the distfiles should reside in /usr. I've been saying this for years. I always change PORTDIR everywhere to /var/portage > /var is expected to be heavily written and read from, as it is the case > with the portage tree. > > It's possibly subject to fragmentation and small file sizes and heavy > changes, which is usually accounted for my choosing an appropriate > filesystem and configuring it accordingly. 100% correct. The tree is a database. No-one in their right mind would put MySQL data dirs in /usr.... Juts like no-one would put the portage build dir in /usr either > > /usr is expected to be a static directory with mostly read access and > few to no changes on a running system. > > This issue seems to have been ignored for a long time. When I asked > about it, I met two types of responses: > > a) Those who thought about it and agreed, that portage should be moved > b) Those who replied "deal with it" > > If you can think of good counter arguement which *logically* supports > that portage should by default reside in /usr (including the distfiles > and everything else variable) please tell us. Here's the real reason: FreeBSD puts ports in /usr. So Daniel put portage in /usr when he ported ports to portage Everyone else since has left it there. Sometimes the obvious reason really is the right one. > If not, please refrain > from logically irrelevant statements such as the above, "you can always > do <insert some random workarround here>" or similar ones. > > If you have further arguments to support my point, I'd also welcome them > to the discussion, > > I expect 90% or more of the real arguments to support my point. > > I've also heard rumours that such an outcome has already been there in > the past, yet, gentoo developers ignored it and kept portage in /usr for > unknown and most likely unlogical reasons. I believe these rumours. > > If again, the logical conclusion will be that portage should be moved > but it is not acted upon but logic is ignored, please ask yourself what > kind of distribution we are. > > "It is a community built around a distribution which is driven by > more than 300 developers and thousands of users. " It's trivially easy to change, so there's no good reason not to. Reset PORTDIR, edit layman's configs, create new directories. In the vast majority of cases that's all that's required. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
