George Adkins wrote:
> Uhh..  EVERY machine (Except the SGI machines running XFS) I have has a 
> separate /usr from /, in fact they all have separate (partitions or 
> drives) /var, /usr, /home, /usr/pkgsrc...

I'm not entirely sure I remember correctly, but when I tried Solaris 10
beta on an U5, I think it installed all on one partition...

> this is *basic* to how you lay out a reliable Unix system.

I believe how you lay out your system depends on things, including
but not limited to
  a) your application
  b) your hardware (how many disks you have -- though you could also
     make them all appear as one with ccd)
  c) how you want to lay it out

> Everything in one big / slice is BAD

Not always.

> otherwise, why is there even an /etc/fstab? 

To cater for different needs, like when you don't want one big
/ partition. I don't believe NetBSD has any intention of
deprecating that, ever. Even if sysinst offers one big / as default
these days (does it?), it's simple enough to change that...

> /sbin is for the important tools that need to be statically linked 
> (notice the 's' in the beginning of 'sbin'?)

I always thought that was for "system", not "static" (as in:
ls(1) in /bin is just a random binary, but mount(8) in /sbin is for
system management). Think back to the days when the whole system
(NetBSD or otherwise) was static. /sbin was there then, so I doubt
"s" is for "static"

> so that if you bring the 
> system up in single-user mode, you have some tools that *actually work* 
> for recovering a down system, or adding disks, or moving filesystems 
> around on to different disks, etc...

For this, NetBSD has /rescue.

> As was pointed out earlier, all the world is *NOT* an PeeCee with a 
> single fifteen-billion-gigabyte IDE drive in it.

So you go and partition your system differently. NetBSD has the tools
and support for it. That's what I do.

And you can even build the whole system yourself to be static, if you
really want to.