Subject: Re: Root, partitions, directoryes

From: [email-masked] (David W. Summers)
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 92 21:50 CST

Maybe part of the problem people are having with directories in certain places
in the file system structure is that there has not been any talk (that I've
seen) about what partitions are assumed.

I know that on a SUN, there is the / (root) partition, a /usr partition which
is read-only, a /home partition for the users and a /var partition where
/var/tmp, /var/spool, etc. are place in.

Maybe this can help clear up why some people like directories in certain
places in the file system tree??????????

   - David Summers

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From: [email-masked] (Theodore Ts'o)
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 92 12:45:53 -0500

Date: Fri, 14 Feb 92 21:50 CST
   From: [email-masked] (David W. Summers)

   I know that on a SUN, there is the / (root) partition, a /usr
   partition which is read-only, a /home partition for the users and a
   /var partition where /var/tmp, /var/spool, etc. are place in.

Hold on a second!  Sun can assume that people need to have so many
partitions, because after all, Sun is a hardware manufacturer and makes
money selling disks.  Some of us may not have the luxury of throwing so
many disks/partitions at the problem.  That's why I've been plugging
/usr/home.  People with one /usr partition can have /usr/home be in the
same partition as /usr, and people with more disks (and by extension,
money) to burn, can mount one of their copious numbers of partitions on
/usr/home.  

In contrast, if you use /homes then you must either use a sym link from
/usr/homes to /homes, which gets confusing to users --- or you have to
use another partition.  (Theoretically, I suppose you have a third
options of using one gigantic partition and mount it in /, but that's
not very satisfying either.)

I do agree, though, that we should just adopt the draft filesystem
standard, since I doubt we will be able to get accomplish much more by
merely flaming on the subject.  To give it credit, it looks a lot less
like a camel(*) than many other standards efforts which I have seen, and it
is definitely better than what we have now.

						- Ted

(*) Definition of a camel: a horse designed by committee