On 02/05/2011 12:05 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
Apparently, though unproven, at 20:43 on Saturday 05 February 2011, Cedric
Sodhi did opine thusly:
There are several reasons why portage, neither the tree nor (especially
not) the distfiles should reside in /usr.
I've been saying this for years. I always change PORTDIR everywhere to
/var/portage
/var is expected to be heavily written and read from, as it is the case
with the portage tree.
It's possibly subject to fragmentation and small file sizes and heavy
changes, which is usually accounted for my choosing an appropriate
filesystem and configuring it accordingly.
100% correct. The tree is a database.
No-one in their right mind would put MySQL data dirs in /usr....
Juts like no-one would put the portage build dir in /usr either
/usr is expected to be a static directory with mostly read access and
few to no changes on a running system.
This issue seems to have been ignored for a long time. When I asked
about it, I met two types of responses:
a) Those who thought about it and agreed, that portage should be moved
b) Those who replied "deal with it"
If you can think of good counter arguement which *logically* supports
that portage should by default reside in /usr (including the distfiles
and everything else variable) please tell us.
Here's the real reason:
FreeBSD puts ports in /usr.
So Daniel put portage in /usr when he ported ports to portage
Everyone else since has left it there.
Sometimes the obvious reason really is the right one.
Good grief, I just finished sending a reply that says exactly the same.
I should have waited a day.
