On Sun, Sep 17, 2023 at 08:28:56AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Bill Allombert <ballo...@debian.org> writes: > > On Sun, Sep 17, 2023 at 10:41:55AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: > >> On Sep 17, Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote: > > >>> (I am a little confused by this wording, but I think what you're > >>> saying is that /usr is encrypted and read-only, and /var is recreated > >>> on each boot. That at least is my understanding of the pattern that > >>> you're trying to enable.) > > >> The general idea is to be able to create /var on the first boot. > > > Does not that would break users expectation that the system image > > contains /var before the first boot ? > > > A lot of things in /var are caches that are mostly instance-independent > > and can be prefilled, but for that, users expect a minimal directory > > hierarchy to be present before first boot. > > Not that I think we're particularly close to achieving this design > currently (and to be clear we haven't decided we're working towards this > yet), but while I understand why a user would have that expectation today, > I'm not sure why it would practically matter. If all of that directory > structure appears on first boot, and no static data is stored in /var, > what use case requires the directory structure already exist in /var > before the first boot?
As I said, filling the caches in /var/cache. For that they need to exist with correct ownership and permissions. Most of the cache in /var/cache/ (some are in /var/lib actually) do not depend on the host configuration, and can be regenerated/redownloaded as needed, but not for free. For example you might want to populate /var/cache/apt/archives/ with the debs you need install later on (for example for a pbuilder-like system), populate /var/lib/texmf/fonts/ with your fonts, or even populate /var/www with your website, etc. Cheers, -- Bill. <ballo...@debian.org> Imagine a large red swirl here.
