Getting rid of /usr for F12?

[Hans de Goede]

On 04/17/2009 01:58 AM, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> Heya,
>
> there's one topic that keeps popping up in various discussions: can't
> we get rid of /usr? The seperation of / and /usr doesn't make much
> sense anymore. We could make /usr a symlink to / for an interims phase
> and everything would be good for conservative folks who think the FHS
> is the holy bible.
>
> In the past more and more stuff has been moved from /usr to /. It's
> unlikely that it's going to become less. Also, right now I am aware of
> quite a few packages that don't get the seperation of / and /usr right
> and rely on stuff from /usr during early bootup.
>
> Let's eliminate this source of errors and clean up our file system
> layout a bit. Let's drop /usr for F12!
>
> And for the folks who think /usr is awesome because it allows mounting
> /usr ro while mounting / rw: it's not. Much more useful it would be if
> / in its entirety could be mounted ro. Debian allows that. It's not
> too hard to make that work on fedora as well.
>
> We wouldn't exactly be the first system without /usr as it seems. Hurd
> does that too as I was informed. That makes at least one thing they
> got right.
>
> Let the flamefest begin!
>

I think that getting rid of /usr is a pretty pointless excercise in moving
things around. What we do need todo is better document in which scenarios
having /usr on a separate partition then / is supported and in which not.

That would seriously limit the amount of stuff which would need to be
moved to / , for example having a separate /usr on a network based
filesystem (or blockdevice such as iscsi) will not work, as netfs now
a days get mounted after NetworkManager and NM itself lives in /usr.

So what we need is a good document describing which combo's of separate
/ and /usr we do support and which we do not, more in general a document
which describes which dirs may be on separate partitions from / would be
good as I've for example seen bug reports that having /var on a separate
partitions has issues (to which my reply then is, well don't do that you
silly).

Regards,

Hans