Thus spake Greg A. Woods ("GAW> ") sometime Today...

GAW> > It's up to the individual, of course, and I can see where / and
GAW> > /usr make a good merge now (but don't enforce it, please, by
GAW> > doing something stupid like making dependencies on /usr being
GAW> > mounted in single-user mode!), but I still think having anything
GAW> > user-writable on / is a bad idea.  Old habits die hard, I guess.
GAW>
GAW> Leaving /usr on the root filesystem does not, by default, leave anything
GAW> user-writable on the root filesystem, at least not so long as /tmp is
GAW> kept separate, but that's a separate issue regardless of where /usr is.

I never alluded to the contrary.  I think you're reading something in
that isn't there.  The rationales for keeping / and /usr separate are,
at this point, no longer relevant to the discussion and are now being
relegated to a matter of personal preference.

GAW> > [We reallly ought to give some thought to keeping system logs
GAW> >  on a non-user-writable partition, too.]
GAW>
GAW> Yes, I agree /var/tmp should be kept separate from the rest of what's
GAW> normally on /var.  So should /var/mail of course, and /var/spool/ftp if
GAW> you turn on ftpd and put user writable dirs there, etc., etc., etc....

/var/tmp and /var/mail are defined; ~ftp, ~news, ~http et al. are not,
and you can put them anywhere, depending on preference.

GAW> > And, from my experience, trying to figure out what goes where
GAW> > on Linux is a f(rea)king nightmare.  It's enough to confuse someone
GAW> > into having EVERYTHING on /.
GAW>
GAW> I think you're still confused about the cause and effect here.....
GAW>
GAW> You should be more worried about people who set LOCALBASE=/usr/local and
GAW> then also install non-packaged software in with packaged software.  :-)

Heh.  There, again, it's a matter of preference, and my sensibilities
(such as they are) tell me that installing third-party software atop
system software is a much more insane mix than that to which you allude
above.

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: The Power of Code.