RFC

[Daniel Bradley]

Michael Stone wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 15, 2000 at 06:54:07AM -0800, Robert W. Current wrote:
> > Linux was once fairly complete at 10M, now it's easily 500M in /usr, and
> > nothing in /usr/local or /opt.  That's starting to get rediculus.  The OS
> > is not 500M...  That's the issue.  So, why is there 500+M of crap in
> > /usr/bin?
> 
> Why would it be better to have 500M in /opt? That's the sticking point.
> You're saying that you don't want a standard that allows distributions
> to put things in /usr, and I'm saying that there are distributions that
> want to do things that way. Can you offer a reasoned argument to support
> why your way is right and the other way is wrong?

In a networked environment it would be better for a lot of the
packages currently in /usr to be installed in /opt. Why?

Because, if a distribution installation is allowed to overwrite
/usr then /usr shouldn't be networked. Or from the other angle,
if you want (after an installation) to mount /usr, then its a
waste of time and local disk resources to have the installation
install in a local /usr. See NOTE 1.

To save disk space many things can be shared, as /usr/local
should be local to a machine, /opt is the natural place for such
sharing to occur.

Personally I think it would be good that if you accidentely
destoryed your root partition, you didn't have to overwrite
500+MB of perfectly fine /usr during a reinstall. :)

NOTE 1: That said, if you want to mount /usr you might want a
subset of /usr on your local machine for redundancy, so that if
your network falls over you can still get a system running.