[fhs-discuss] static sharable files

[Roger Leigh]

On Mon, May 09, 2011 at 11:22:30PM -0400, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> On 05/09/2011 05:38 AM, Roger Leigh wrote:
> > But all of the existing issues identified by having the separation
> > fail to address an even bigger issue: sharing /usr is entirely
> > incompatible with a modern package manager, and this has always been
> > the case.  See:
> >
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/01/msg00152.html
> 
> This is true for (most) Linux distributions, but let's not forget that 
> the FHS tries to be a standard for UNIX-like filesystems in general, 
> including systems like the *BSDs, Solaris, etc.
> 
> I'm not saying you're wrong, but we need to be considerate of 
> "historical" use cases for some of our older cousins, even if those use 
> cases no longer make sense in the Linux context.

In the case of sharing /usr, I would be interested to know if
any BSD or Solaris user did this, and I would be rather surprised if
they supported it, because they also suffer from all system
configuration being in /etc (with no /usr/etc).  Hence they have
exactly the same sharing issues as on Linux.

I did find one instance of FreeBSD /usr being shared between thin
clients.  But like the few cases of Linux users doing this, the
issue of syncing /etc and keeping files outside /usr up-to-date is
unaddressed.  So from the distributor's POV, this isn't a supported
feature--it's a hack implemented by the end user.

In general, I have no problem with the wider scope of the FHS, but
in this case I think that a "shared" /usr is really something which
should be a historical footnote rather than an accepted practice on
any modern system.


Regards,
Roger

-- 
  .''`.  Roger Leigh
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