Re: The naming wars continue...

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 03:17:16PM -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
> > Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> > >Why there is any distinction between, say, gcc and X?
> > >KDE and Midnight Commander? etc... Why some of them go
> > >to /opt while others are spread across dozen of dirs?
> > >This seems to be inconsistent to me.
> > 
> > At one time Sun had the convention that things in /usr could be mounted 
> > ro on multiple machines. That worked, it predates Linux so Linux was the 
> > o/s which chose to go another way, and it covered the base things in a 
> > system.
> > 
> > That actually seems like a good way to split a networked environment, 
> > with /bin and /sbin having just enough to get the system up and mount 
> > /usr. I can't speak to why that is being done differently now.
> > 
> > I guess someone was nervous about mounting a local /usr/local on a 
> > (possibly) network mounted /usr and theu /opt, but that's a guess on my 
> > part as well.
> 
> Read-only /usr is required according to the FHS, and at least on Debian 
> a read-only /usr works without problems.

Indeed. And that's what I use. In /etc/apt/apt.conf I have:

    DPkg {
        // Auto re-mounting of a readonly /usr
	Pre-Invoke {"mount -o remount,rw /usr";};
	Post-Invoke {"mount -o remount,ro /usr";};
    }

> A bigger problem might be to properly support it in the package manager.

Yep. Apt knows about it, but dpkg doesn't. And remounting /usr read-only
fails if files are in use.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

						Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
							    -- Linus Torvalds
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