the "separate /usr" subthread

[David G. Miller]

Matthew Miller <mattdm <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:

> 
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 09:50:10AM -0700, Howard Howell wrote:
> > > It's important to realize that you *can* have a separate /usr -- it just
> > > really needs to be available at boot time. That means you can have
> > > separate mount options, filesystems, partition constraints, or whatever.
> > > It just doesn't work anymore to have it on a network share or (if anyone
> > > ever did this!) removable media added after initial boot.
> > But in the modern business environment, users log in from multiple
> > places.  How does that work if the user directory is local?  
> 
> On modern Linux/Unix, the "/usr" directory holds system binaries and
> libraries -- it is not the user directory. On Fedora (and most Linux
> systems), that is "/home". And there's no problem sharing that over the
> network.
> 
The funny thing is that back in the earliest days of Unix, /usr is where
user directories lived.  When K&R ran out of room in / for programs, they
looked to for a partition that had additional space available and it was
/usr.  Originally programs ended up in /usr/bin simply because there wasn't
room for them in /bin; not for some usage reason.

Cheers,
Dave