begin quoting Lan Barnes as of Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 11:28:16AM -0700: > On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 01:05:00PM -0500, JD Runyan wrote: [snip] > > You should read the FHS(http://www.pathname.com/fhs/). It basically says > > that all variable files should go in /var. This includes logs, > > databases, and spools. This was done to allow for more filesystems to > > be mounted as read only. > > Reading it and agreeing with it are two different things ... or am I not > allowed to think any more?
No, no, someone came up with a way of doing things and called it a "standard", so you MUST comply! Give in to the consensus. Go with the flow! It's not rule of thumb, it's a guideline! It's not so much a guideline as a rule! A law, even! Jack-booted thugs will be smashing down your door any day now! Now, as for me, since I'm a contrarian, I mount partitions on places like /scratch and /space and /data... I don't use /home if I can use /users instead. And so on and so forth. FHS is very nice if you want everyone to look the same. I just haven't been convinced yet that having everyone look the same is a good idea. > Tell me, what files besides /usr/bin are not potentially "variable"? /sbin, /bin (although this is often a link to /usr/bin), /lib and /usr/lib, /opt, and most (but not all) of /etc. Presumably /boot or /kernel or whatever you want to call it as well. > Should my resume and correspondence go in there? _All_ data bases? > What's the advantage of a partition scheme where one partition is so ill > defined that any damn thing can go in there? Should I put everything in > /tmp that might someday get erased? Anything you don't care about after a reboot or seven days can go in /tmp; I often create a /tmp/$USER as a convenient place to put stuff I don't care about once I'm done (I unpack a lot of source packages and try to compile 'em there, and then if I forget to delete 'em, who cares?). > /var is ill defined IMNSHO. I figure /var is for transient data ... logs, printer-, mail-, and netnews- spools, lockfiles and pid files, pending patch-related files, package databases, etc. -- all stuff that if it went away or I couldn't write to it for an hour would not cripple the system. If you're setting up a system for some sort of production use, putting that Very Important Application on its own partition and then mounting that partition on / isn't a bad idea -- if you're setting up oracle, there is nothing wrong with /oracle, for example -- put your important stuff where it's easy to get to. That being said, 99% of the time, I stick to $HOME anyway. -Stewart "File System Structure Anarchist" Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
