Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:
>

>     I think you should first question why you would need to mount /usr on a partition of its own.

>

>     You only need to care about disk space if you break down your OS into several partitions.

>

>     I, personally, consider having /usr a mountpoint makes little sense. For /boot, it makes sense only if you have more than one Linux distro on your machine, or if the filesystem of / is not supported by Grub.

>

>     All these separate partitions buizness forces you to consider carefully the space allocated to each of them. Don't forget that the package manager maintains files on all of /, /usr, /boot, /var, and /etc. Loosing data on any of these leaves it in a dirty state.

>

>     Having only Devuan on my computers, I lean to keep the whole OS, with the exception of /home, on one single partition.

I like /var on it’s own partition too - that way, if^H^Hwhen something goes wild and spews lots of logging to disk, it doesn’t bring the machine down. Been there :-(

And I guess there’s an element of “comfort” involved. My memory goes back to when LILO had severe limits on where it could read from using the machine’s BIOS, hence the requirement for a separate /boot to guarantee LILO could read everything it needed to - but, see below, I’ve been glad of a separate /boot a few times over the years long after that became the case.
The same comfort factor is why I still use Ext3 (see below on pain with Ext4) - it does everything I need of it and is pretty reliable.

> The time when one could loose data because of filesystem failure is gone,

Really ? Did I miss the news that reality has given in to wishful thinking ? Yes, I know things are a lot more reliable than they used to be (my memory goes back to Ext2 without journalling, and other systems) but nothing is infallible.

> and, when the OS is badly broken, it may be easier to re-install than to repair it.

It doesn’t need to be badly broken, even minor issues can stop the system booting. Having a more or less static /boot makes it easy to drop into a terminal and fix things - using the tools (and versions) appropriate to the system*.


* For example, one of my early encounters with fixing Ext4 involved finding that the boot CD I had didn’t have all the options the filesystem was using - it wasn’t my own system, and I don’t recall what was wrong with it, I just recall it being a “learning curve” finding to that Ext4 has so many options which may or may not be supported by ${favourite_recovery_disk}.


Obviously, YMMV.

Simon