Luke Mewburn <lukem@wasabisystems.com> writes:
> On Mon, Feb 17, 2003 at 12:59:13PM -0700, Rick Kelly wrote:
>   | Martin Husemann said:
>   | 
>   | >Read the commit message. Luke removed stuff that made installs (and
>   | >"build.sh build" runs) remove *my* /home. Making updates not remove
>   | >my /home greatly improves NetBSD, in my point of view!
>   | 
>   | I have machines running 1.4.3 up to -current. If I run "make build" on
>   | any of those machines, nothing happens to /home or /usr/local.
> 
> There are a variety of issues with having /home and /usr/local
> in the "base" set in NetBSD, including:
> 
>     *	Those directories may often be (NFS) shared in a heterogenous
>     	network, and a NetBSD installcreating and/or changing the
>     	ownership and permission of these directories may not be desired.

You need a mount point -- having /home as a mount point or as a real
directory is the same thing. There is no harm in having it.

>     *	If these are symbolic links to other locations, pax will unlink
> 	the symlink and replace the path with an empty directory.

However, that's a general problem with our install. If /usr/include is
a symlink, it will be blown away, too. I've had this happen when I've
made /var/spool a symlink to a place with more space. Obviously the
solution isn't to get rid of /var/spool -- that would be silly. The
solution is to fix the install system so that it does not do this, and
I'm very much in favor of our finding a good way to do that.

> These issues often cause people inconvenience *every* time they install
> the 'base' set.

I can see the latter causing inconvenience, but how does the fact that
you are going to NFS mount /home make it a problem to have a /home
directory? You NEED a /home directory to do the NFS mount. And as I
said, the unlinking-symlinks problem is a general problem, not
specific to the /home and /usr/local paths, and we need to fix it
because it will cause other problems.

> Conversely, for those that want the old behaviour, the new inconvience
> of not having these directories is limited to the initial installation,
> and is rectified with a few once-off operations at that time.

There are already a lot of "once-off" operations to perform at install
time. It would be nice to have them go down with time, not go up.

In any case, although some argument might be made for /usr/local, I
can't see that the arguments for /home are legitimate. No one is
actually helped by this change at all if you ignore the symlink issue,
which as I note does not motivate us to remove /sbin because /sbin
might be a symlink. I would like us to undo this change.


-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry@piermont.com