File Systems.

[Daniel Quinlan]

Erik Troan <ewt at redhat.com> writes:

> There are also issues like existing customers tend to have small /
> partitions and no /opt, and woulnd't have been able to install KDE without
> symlink mucking as well. Making sure that folks can easily upgrade to LSB
> distributions from current ones should be a priorty, and it argues against
> /opt (unless you think ln -s /usr/opt /opt is a good idea, which I think is
> just a hack).

I think "ln -s /<large-partition>/opt /opt" is fine.  We only care about
the pathname that gets referenced.  Also, in the actual implementation,
/usr doesn't have to be the location.  As an example, I have this at
home:

  /  (root partition, which actually includes /usr)
  /export  (large partition)
  /home -> /export/home
  /usr/local -> /export/local

And if I had a /opt at home, I would do:

  /opt -> /export/opt

I separate out /export to separate all local stuff from distribution
stuff, but this same structure could be used to solve small / partitions
for new customers.  Using a symbolic link to /usr (assuming it's a
mount-point) for existing customers may or may not be a hack, but it
works and it make sense.

(The name "export" has no particular meaning here since the filesystems
aren't exported anywhere.  You can call it whatever you want.)

- Dan