On Thu, 2012-08-09 at 21:02 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
I think it's at least safe to say that it's no one's place to try to tell anyone else, let alone everyone else, something as sweeping as "there is no use for separate /usr". Asking why someone does it is the wrong question. They do. And they have their reasons. And the OS needs to support it. Or else become less useful and useful to less. It's interesting that in this thread - if I didn't miss anything - many
On 08/09/2012 05:36 PM, Brian K. White wrote: people told why having separate partitions are useful. I agree with that. I just don't remember seeing a use case why a separate /usr is beneficial. Yes, people do it - and openSUSE continues to support it - but the only reasons I'm aware of are historical like [1]. So, what is the reason to create a separate /usr with openSUSE 12.2? Please educate me ;)
IMNSHO, there are none / zero reasons for a dedicated /usr partition. And the world is frowning on the practice. Modern systems, especially desktops, are complicated and require a variety of services to spin up at boot [you have wireless security, possibly VPNs, possibly cryptography, hot-plug support for USB and other busses, bluetooth, HID, etc...] and get the machine to a "normal" state. So having this nicely organized in the root volume [ /sbin, /etc, /sbin, /bin, /lib ] is just a nicer way to do it. I'm sure they exist but *I* have never seen a thin client that mount's the *server's* /usr; so I don't really believe that is relevant either [and I'd consider it very odd, and just a bad idea]. Last I saw that type of mounting was far back in the day when not-thin "workstations" mounted points of the server to their own hierarchy to save precious disk space. It meant central updates broke things, network outages broke workstations, and that performance was hobbled - pretty much everyone stopped doing that once disks got cheap enough.