Hello, On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 04:33:16AM -0800, Paul E Condon wrote: > > > earth make all the Debian-versions the mount-points of removable media > > > in the root directory instead of /mnt/, which is the required standard > > i consider /mnt/{cdrom,floppy} a redhat sickness. first of all, please > > show me where the FHS supposedly dictates those two mount points into > > /mnt? > > then, look at section 3.11: > > "/mnt : Mount point for a temporarily mounted filesystem" > > and that's exactly what it's for. so you can mount a filesystem > > what do others think? > what seemed to me to be a clear prohibition against putting anything > into / (root) that is not specifically mentioned in the FHS. It does > give a little wriggle room since it is "directories" that are > prohibited, not "mount points". But I'm not impressed by my own wriggle. > It would allow unlimited additions to /, so long as the addition is a > mount point for a separate partition as opposed to an ordinary > directory. This is clearly a silly distinction. > So I'll suggest a rephrasing of the original question: > Why does the FHS containing wording which appears to prohibit placing > mount points in / ? Mount points really are directories, aren't they? > And directories are prohibited. Reading you answers, I realized that the FHS is really ambigous concerning this question. It clearly says that /mnt is a mountpoint for _a_ temporally mounted partition, and not a dir for mountpoints, but on the other hand it prohibits creating additional dirs in / -- with an argumantations which seems to speak only against dirs with content on the root-partition and not against mountpoints.
Granted that the interpretation of FHS is problematic, I would say that it is a strange supposition that one could have only one temp. mounted device at one time. The other problem in my opinion is the probable overpopulation of the /, if we put all the mountpoints of removable media there: one could have /cdrom, /floppy1, /floppy2, /cdrw /zip etc. The whole point of using a directory hierarchy is the ability of grouping similar things together. An other point that I as a purist like all the machines I administer to have the same dirs at least on the highest level. :-) Regards: Andras