/root on a separate dataset breaks FreeBSD-base installation

[Grzegorz Junka]

> The norm is there are very few cross directory links and
> this is very rarely an issue unless someone modifies the
> system in a way outside of the norm.  Having /root as a
> seperate dataset is outside the norm.  Note this also
> places /root outside of the boot environment directory
> which may bring other issues in the future.
>
> Ports should all install stuff inder the /usr/local hierarchy
> and that is usually self contained, so hard links are not
> an issue there.
>
> Further note, if you have made /usr/local its own dataset
> your defanitly going to have issues with boot environments
> if you try to run more than 1 version of FreeBSD as /usr/local
> is pretty version dependent.
>
> /var is a whole nother crap mess with boot environments,
> pkg and multiple versions cause pkg stores its caches
> and databases in /var and /var is not part of the BE.


That's exactly my thinking. Boot environments might work for servers 
where there are very few packages installed on host directly and the 
host is usually running dedicated jails. But it's another story on a 
desktop where the system and all packages take 17GB. I don't want to be 
reinstalling everything manually whenever I upgrade the base system and 
I don't want to deal with pkg having to work across multiple boot 
environments.

For desktop my preference is to keep one copy of /usr/local, var, tmp, 
root, home, and so on, so essentially just have the base system and 
basic configuration versioned in the boot environment. Sure, some 
packages won't work properly, but that's easy to fix. I build them with 
newer base on another system then reinstall all of them on the desktop.

I don't consider /root as part of the base system. A hardlink doesn't 
make it part of a base system. It's home directory for the /root user, 
where I often have larger files that I either copy to install or just as 
a backup of some parts of the system. Versioning it per boot environment 
wouldn't make sense.

--GrzegorzJ