In message <20000411032722.E097AE7@proven.weird.com>, Greg A. Woods writes:
>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)?

So I have been told.

>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.

As an interesting data point, the SVR4 Unix I used *COULD NOT REBOOT CLEANLY*
if /usr was a separate partition.

>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!

Actually, given that, I still tend to prefer / and /usr separate - mostly
because of password files.  / can be backed up easily, /usr takes a while
and doesn't really have data.

-s