On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 06:50:47PM +0200, Giacomo Catenazzi wrote: > Roger Leigh wrote: > > On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 05:41:06PM +0200, Stéphane Glondu wrote: > >> Marco d'Itri a écrit : > >>> I know that Debian supports this, but I also know that maintaning > >>> forever large changes to packages for no real gain sucks. > >>> A partial list of invalid reasons is: [...] > >> How about: "my /usr is shared by many machines over NFS"? > > > > That might have been a "traditional" reason for a shared /usr. > > However, the package manager can't cope with this setup since > > you have some components of a package installed locally and > > some remotely for all systems using the "shared" part. It's > > an impossible situation to actually cater for in real life. > > Has anyone ever actually *done* this? > > So why we created /usr/share (and moved documentation) ?
Good question. While it's nice to keep arch-indep and arch-dep files separated, I have never seen any cases where the arch-indep information is actually shared amongst architectures (except for at the arch:all package level, of course). > But also I don't think it is a problem sharing usr > on multiple system with multiple configurations. Keeping such as configuration updated would be hard, since each system would have an independent dpkg state in /var and different conffile state in /etc. If you removed a package on one system, it might purge files in use on another, and if you install a package on one the conffiles won't be installed on the others, etc.. > On non public working stations, one doesn't run randomly > programs. If I installed mysql-server on a system, > it will work on such system, but if I install on > an other system, it work also on the other system, > occupying only one instance. > > I don't see problem from package management > (also because we have a nullpotent dpkg), so > we can upgrade from multiple system without problems. I'm not sure I see how this would work; I'd like to see some examples, especially WRT the simple problems I outlined above. > > Looking at GNU/Hurd, /usr is a symlink to /. If we were to make > > /usr non-separable, maybe this would be the way to go. > > or plan9, which bind mount all /*/bin into the main /bin. > I can live with such solution, but please allow us to use /usr > in a different (maybe shared) partition. The plan9 situation is truly wonderful, and one can only hope that Linux can do this at some point in the future. I know we have unionfs and aufs, but I wouldn't trust them for this just yet! Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
