Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, "Why?")

[Kevin Martin]

On 03/24/2014 10:38 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
> On Mar 24, 2014, at 6:45 AM, lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
> 
>> Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> On Sun, Mar 23, 2014 at 10:56:13PM +0100, lee wrote:
>>>>
>>>> There`s nothing weird or exotic about it.  I`ve always had /usr on its
>>>> own partition until the F17 installer refused that, which it shouldn`t
>>>> have.
>>>
>>> I'm sorry but the installer denying /usr on its own partition on F17 is
>>> the right thing to do.  I believe F17 introduced something called
>>> usr-move, meaning all the binaries in /bin /sbin are actually
>>> hardlinks/symlinks to /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.  I believe this was a
>>> multi-distribution effort.  In such a configuration, there is no
>>> justification or gain of putting it in a separate partition, on top of
>>> that the booting process becomes quite complicated.
>>
>> /usr belongs on it`s own partition.  
> 
> As if no one has ever said that before, and as if it convinced even one thinking person to change their mind. 
> 
> Fedora has never defaulted to separate /usr partition. It's been two years since this was decided. That you're still experiencing cognitive dissonance over this ancient long ago resolve topic is your problem, not anyone else's.
> 
>> And last time I looked, it would
>> not be compliant with the FHS not to have what is needed in /bin and
>> /sbin but to use symlinks instead.
> 
> bin lib lib64 are symlinks to their locations in /usr.
> 
> 
> Chris Murphy
> 
Just to add to the topic, the reason we once had separate /usr, /var, etc. partitions was to make it easier to recover filesystems.
 It took a long time for fsck to search partitions when the drives were small and then to recover.  With todays drives being the
sizes they are, it still makes sense (in my mind) to keep the partitions separate for the same reason.  Just because systems have
gotten faster it's still time consuming to have to try to recover data on huge partitions...separation mitigates that issue to a
great degree.  Another point, there was a comment in the thread made that admin binaries, user binaries, application binaries don't
need to be kept separate anymore...I call B.S. on that.  Part of the reason that /usr, /bin, /lib, etc. were partitioned as they
were was to allow that happen (both from a recovery perspective and, frankly, from a security perspective...kind of the start of the
concept of sandboxing).  I see no argument to be made to *allow them to be together except laziness.  I, for one and probably a
minority, try to keep as much of the partitioning "as it was in the '80s" as I can for those same reasons...does it mean that
up-front I have to do a little more work?  Sure...do I reap benefits from it?  Absolutely!  (as you can probably tell I was not a
proponent of the usr merge that happened a few years ago).

Kevin