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Author: Rainer Weikusat
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] running with separate / and /usr
Antony Stone <Antony.Stone@???> writes:
> On Monday 16 January 2023 at 16:27:05, Svante Signell via Dng wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 2023-01-15 at 21:18 +0200, Boian Bonev via Dng wrote:
>> > > On Sun, 2023-01-15 at 15:18 +0100, karl@??? wrote:
>> >
>> > As a conclusion we'd better get prepared to accept the usrmerge, like
>> > it or not...
>>
>> I strongly disagree with that opinion, anybody else?
>
> Without wishing to open a large can of annelids, can someone tell me why
> anybody actually cares about this? What is the use case for having /usr on a
> separate partition - why does anybody want it?


There are not many good reasons for that. The ones I know out of my head
are

    - /usr can be mounted read-only, / can't


        - /usr can be mounted with noatime without loosing any features
          as it's read-mostly


    - defect isolation (something which has just bitten me very
          badly): Assuming a physical defect occurs on some part of a
          disk, this will trash a perfectly random subset of anything
          that's on this partition


    - It's possible to use dpkg -S `which <command>` to determine
          the package a particular command belongs to. With the merged
          /usr as in Debian 10, which will aways return /bin or /sbin as
          pathname


    - I arrange my stuff how I want it to be arranged. I don't care
          about the file system on Lennart Poettering's laptop. I don't
          care about him re-arranging my bookshelves, either.


That said, while I think this merge is a hairbrained idea (huge
disruption for no gain), I don't really care about it, as it doesn't do
much damage.