Does anyone reuse /boot or /var partitions ?

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2015-01-22 at 15:54 -0700, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 01:36:35PM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > There's a proposed anaconda patch ATM which would disallow 
> > mounting an existing partition as /boot or /var (or any 
> > subdirectory of those except /var/www ) without reformatting it. 
> > i.e., you can't reuse an existing partition with those mountpoints.
> 
> Well, somebody with a carefully crafted configuration in 
> /var/named/, for example, presumably will be not very happy.  I 
> wonder why /var/www/ is singled out for a special treatment?

> > The main driving force for this is 
> > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1074358
> 
> And /var comes into this picture how?  Just curious.

As I mentioned, it's a re-use of an existing bit of logic; I don't 
have the history behind the exact list of mountpoints handy, but you 
can likely track it out from the commit history and Bugzilla. I would 
imagine we became aware of multiple cases where re-using an existing 
/var caused problems. It could obviously cause issues with package 
manager databases for e.g.

As for /var/www , if I had to bet, the check for /var was introduced 
and then someone complained that it covered /var/www but re-using 
/var/www is safe, so the exception was added. More exceptions can be 
added if desired, it's a simple list.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
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