Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2014 20:47:48 +0100 From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de> To: Mike Clarke <jmc-freebsd2@milibyte.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Where do user files go these days? Message-ID: <20141109204748.db54a1cc.freebsd@edvax.de> In-Reply-To: <3272471.UYQ3DxhorQ@curlew.lan> References: <545ED36B.8040207@gmail.com> <545F5AD6.6000404@FreeBSD.org> <545F7B85.1050900@qeng-ho.org> <3272471.UYQ3DxhorQ@curlew.lan>
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On Sun, 09 Nov 2014 15:30:10 +0000, Mike Clarke wrote: > I've never understood the logic of putting /home under /usr. If you > ever needed to do a fresh install from scratch it would be all too > easy to wipe out all of home when you delete the original contents of > /usr. Exactly, that is a problem to expect. I think this idea comes from the "fixed partition size at initialization" paradigm where you had to choose how big each partition should be, and you could not create more than a - h partitions (in the MBR manner). So you thought: / is that big, then add swap, /var should be limited to so and so, and the rest - well, that will be for installed applications and user files, because we don't know how big they might get. If we make /usr too small, we'll run out of space, and if /home is full, well, users can't store any more data... With GPT and "numerical partitions", this problem does not apply anymore. ZFS can also deal perfectly fine with varying numbers of partitions of varying size. And hard disks are also big and cheap. :-) > It goes against the FreeBSD approach of /usr containing material > for the base system and /usr/local for the rest. It might have been > more appropriate to have /usr/local/home but still far safer to have a > top level /home directory. By "deduction" (applied from "man hier"), /usr/local is for installed applications which are managed by the system's package maintaining means (ports collection, pkg, portmaster, whatever you want). But user files are _not_ subject to that maintaining, so they should not be in there. (That is _one_ possible way of interpretation.) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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