On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 05:36:02PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: > So, does anybody still see reasons to continue supporting a standalone > /usr? > If you do, please provide a detailed real-world use case. > A partial list of invalid reasons is: > - "it's really useful on my 386 SX with a 40 MB hard disk"
How about a 486 with a 96 MB Disk-on-Chip module? I maintain one such computer (it's a PC104 form factor machine), as well as a number of AMD Geodes (586) with 256 MB CompactFlash cards. It is very useful for these sytems to have a minimal and functioning root filesystem, but to mount /usr over NFS. Also, thin clients without harddisks may have a small SSD or get an initrd with a root filesystem from TFTP, but again mount a shared, possible read-only /usr over NFS. I have an EeePC 901 with root and /home on the first 4 GB SSD, and /usr on the second 16 GB SSD. The /usr is mounted read-only, and only remounted read-write when apt is running. I have this setup because the first SSD is slightly faster than the second, and the large /usr disk allows me to have a very large fraction of Debian installed. That said, the choice to put a program in /bin or /usr/bin is quite arbitrary. It would be nice if one could tell dpkg where to install a package (and its dependencies) to. -- Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards, Guus Sliepen <g...@debian.org>
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