Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (286 mails)

["Matthias G. Eckermann" <mge@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all,

On 2010-08-09 T 14:16 +0200 Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Aug 2010, Guido Berhoerster wrote:
> > > In my experience Kay is a lot quicker to dismiss something
> > > as "legacy" than (SLE) customers or (openSUSE) users.
> > > Don't worry, for the former we have people keeping an eye
> > > on the real customer requirements, but I certainly advise
> > > to be somewhat careful on openSUSE as well.
> > If this is business-critical to Novell why doesn't anybody
> > ensure that NFS-mounted /usr keeps working?
>
> It is a fully supported scenario for SUSE Linux Enterprise
> Server 11 (and the releases before) and very likely will be a
> fully supported scenario for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.

Indeed, I confirmed that it has been a supported feature in all
SUSE Linux Enterprise and SUSE Linux/openSUSE releases at least
since we officially supported the FHS (Filesystem Hierarchy
Standard).  Carlos E. R. also mentioned this on Friday.

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#THEFILESYSTEM says:

----------------------------< snip >----------------------------

Rationale
        
Shareable files can be stored on one host and used on several
others.  Typically, however, not all files in the filesystem
hierarchy are shareable and so each system has local storage
containing at least its unshareable files. It is convenient if
all the files a system requires that are stored on a foreign
host can be made available by mounting one or a few directories
from the foreign host.

[...]

Here is an example of a FHS-compliant system. (Other
FHS-compliant layouts are possible.)

    ┌────────┬───────────────┬───────────┐
    │        │   shareable   │unshareable│
    ├────────┼───────────────┼───────────┤
    │static  │/usr           │/etc       │
    ├────────┼───────────────┼───────────┤
    │        │/opt           │/boot      │
    ├────────┼───────────────┼───────────┤
    │variable│/var/mail      │/var/run   │
    ├────────┼───────────────┼───────────┤
    │        │/var/spool/news│/var/lock  │
    └────────┴───────────────┴───────────┘

----------------------------< snap >----------------------------

Q1: Is FHS compliance an important part of openSUSE as a Linux
distribution?

> It is not a top priority for Novell to see in openSUSE 11.4
> and "ensure" is too strong a word from that perspective though
> it would be sad to see it being broken.  Let's keep in mind:
> when it comes to openSUSE, Novell is just one stakeholder,
> even if one contributing a ton.

I fully agree. I think though, we should do a next step, and
analyze if the requirements are also in the interest of openSUSE
beyond Novell.

Here what had been mentioned already in this thread:
- Thin Clients
- Virtual machines
- all (other) use cases with "read only root"

Q2: Are those use cases valid for openSUSE?

If we agree to a "Yes" on both questions, then keeping "/usr" a
shareable and static filesystem will remain a requirement for
openSUSE -- and packages should be adopted accordingly.

so long -
        MgE

-- 
Matthias G. Eckermann
Senior Product Manager - SUSE® Linux Enterprise - Server Product Line
SUSE  LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
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