Where do user files go these days?

[Matthew Seaman]

On 09/11/2014 05:44, Polytropon wrote:
>> Thanks.  In every system I can remember, /home was a separate file 
>> > system (when it existed at all), and I didn't see /usr/home in hier(7), 
>> > so I wondered. 

> Correct; "man hier" doesn't mention it because it's
> a "user thing" mostly, as the OS and system services
> do not use it (or require it to function properly).
> Sharing /usr with home as one partition is (in most
> cases) less critical than putting all "functional
> subtrees" into one and the same partition, so some
> disk-filling "runaway process" could stop /tmp, /var
> and even / from working properly...

I do wonder about the layout generated for home directories by the
installer nowadays.  It is the case that everything expects user home
directories to be in /home/username -- except for the layout in the
installer.

Now, moving /home into /usr/home and making a compatibility symlink
might make sense for some partitioning schemes with UFS, but it
certainly doesn't when installing with ZFS or with an all-in-one style
UFS partition.  It's not like we're constrained in the number of
partitions we can put on one drive in anything like the same way in
these days of GPT either.

In fact, having a zroot/usr/home makes managing boot environments more
complex than it needs to be -- you'ld want /usr/bin and /usr/lib and
almost certainly /usr/local to be part of a BE, but not /usr/home.
Having a zroot/home mounted as /home makes so much more sense.

Don't get me started though -- there are worse problems with managing
what should be in a B.E. and what should not, and trying to reconcile
all that with hier(7).  Much of /var should be part of a B.E., but not
/var/mail or /var/log or /var/db/mysql.  Similarly /usr/local/pgsql
should be outside a B.E.  This leads to all sorts of arcane trickery
like creating a zroot/var ZFS with canmount=off,mountpoint=/var to
overlay zroot/ROOT/BENAME/var with canmount=on,mountpoint=/var all so
you can mount zroot/var/mail from outside the boot environment.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey


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