[ On Sunday, April 9, 2000 at 13:23:11 (-0700), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: /etc/rc.d/ runs slowsly
>
> "Cheapness of resources does not automatically advocate sloppiness in
> design or relaxing of time-honoured infrastructure."
> 
> Stable, yes, indeed.  / is about as stable as you can get - no dynamic
> libraries, no other BS.  Keep it that way.  If I want /usr (really.),
> I can mount it myself.

Did you not know that /usr was split off only because the disks were too
small to keep everything on one way back in the early days (at least
that's the reason I was taught when I asked this question in the early
1980's about V7 to the Unix gurus I knew at the time)?  The importance
of this split grew enormously up until the day that someone though of
putting everything that changed on a live system into /var.  At that
point it again dwindled to being simply one of having enough available
disk space on one cylinder.  Recently even that objection went away with
the common availability of the union filesystem, at least in BSD.

I.e. /usr was a design *compromise* right from the day it was created.
If disks had been only twice as big back then (baring the invocation of
whomever's rule that data will always expand to fill all available disk
space) then /usr would likely never have been created (or at least never
used for anything but home directories).

> _leave_ _it_ _alone!_  Do it your way if you wish, but don't force it
> as the default!  I don't want my system to depend on /usr being there
> in single-user mode.

Just because BSD has continued to refine the brain-damage of /usr to a
fine science doesn't mean it has to be perpetuated forever.  Nor does it
mean that you can't put /usr on the root filesystem and be almost twice
as happy despite the onging need to have a redundant directory (or two
if you're root) in your PATH!

Please do not confuse design issues with issues of necessity!  Please do
not try to perpetuate a compromise that's no longer necessary just
because you dislike change and/or you're unable to adapt.

*Today* thanks to the that careful refinement of the /usr and /var split
there's absolutely no need to put /usr on a separate filesystem
(provided you have the foresight to put users on /home or some such),
not even if your disks are incredibly tiny (provided that you have
enough total disks, and/or that you have an NFS server, to hold a
complete set of system binaries and such).

Personally I've seen people put /usr on the root filesystem (and indeed
some even put /var there too) for over a decade now, even on 100MB disks.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>