On 08/09/12 15:55, Anton Aylward pecked at the keyboard and wrote:
j debert said the following on 08/09/2012 03:32 PM:
Historically [...]
Since the long-standing policy of keeping everything system and everything needed for startup on / has been tossed out and system files essential to startup are buried somewhere, anywhere, in /usr it must be mounted early during startup or be on the root filesystem otherwise the system fails to start up even in runlevel 1 and basically becomes a whiny brick.
That was a design decision not a necessity.
25 years ago disks were expensive, small and slow so it made sense to have separate disks/partitions for ever expanding filesystems. And raid was not very prevalent then if at all and LVM was not available. SunOS even provided a chart for estimating how much space to allocate to certain filesystems. It took experience to figure out what sizes to use which is why the software vendor was called in to help with partitioning (at least where I worked before I was trained to be the IT person).
Startup depends on /usr being there.
That was a design decision not a necessity.
There is no reason the systemd stuff in /usr/ *HAS* to be there. Historically, /boot didn't exist. Historically many of the config files that are now in /etc weren't.
There is no reason other than design decision to make stuff needed by the startup (or shutdown for that matter) in /usr.
/usr can no longer be a separate partition by dint of ignorance or whatever supposedly reasonable motive moved people to disregard policy. To change it back would be too much effort that few are willing to undertake and fewer still are willing to agree with.
True, but we've done great changes to the hierarchy in the past.
The best that can be done now is to ensure that no one starts putting system critical files in /home, /tmp, /media, or other new and weird places.
To a generation that grew up with all the config files in /etc having some in /usr is /weird/.
"Those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it"
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