On 09/30/2013 04:31 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote: > On 30/09/2013 01:31, Daniel Campbell wrote: > > >> Curious; how is merging two filesystems done? I don't have a separate >> /usr and am completely unaffected by this change, but it's somewhat >> interesting to me. /usr stores some pretty important data on it, and I >> imagine you'd need to mount it somewhere else in order to move the >> files from it to /'s /usr dir. Is a Live environment recommended >> instead? How would you mitigate the leftover partition, assuming it's >> not adjacent to /'s partition? > > > Because /usr is continually in use, boot using a livecd of your choice. > In that environment, use fdisk (or whichever *disk you like) to make any > changes to partitions you know you will need. > > Mount your gentoo / somewhere convenient > Mount your gentoo /usr somewhere convenient > > copy the latter over to the former > edit fstab > reboot > > It really is just a case of moving a large number of files around, but > because those very files are always in use you have to do it in livecd > environment. > > There's no exact checklist one can follow to guarantee a 100% result > blindly. Instead, as this is Gentoo, we assume users built their system > knowing what they were doing and can appropriately deal with their > config themselves. RAID and LVM for example may need attention, but the > user is usually equipped to deal with that and knows what t do. > > >> >> I don't run an initramfs, thankfully, but I keep a pretty simple >> system in terms of filesystems: /, /boot, and /home. >> > My suspicions were mostly correct, then. If the merge is that simple, I see no reason not to do it if one doesn't want to roll an initramfs. However, I imagine moving partitions around in gparted or something similar would be quite a wait if / and /usr weren't adjacent on the drive.
Thanks for the simple-but-thorough explanation. :)
