Where do user files go these days?

[Mike Clarke]

On Sunday 09 Nov 2014 14:34:45 Arthur Chance wrote:
> On 09/11/2014 12:15, Matthew Seaman wrote:

[snip]

> > 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.

I've never understood the logic of putting /home under /usr. If you 
ever needed to do a fresh install from scratch it would be all too 
easy to wipe out all of home when you delete the original contents of 
/usr. It goes against the FreeBSD approach of /usr containing material 
for the base system and /usr/local for the rest. It might have been 
more appropriate to have /usr/local/home but still far safer to have a 
top level /home directory. 

[snip]

> I'm glad to find it's not just me who wondered about /var and boot
> environments. I've got /var/tmp, /var/crash and /var/db/entropy
> outside the b.e. as well, although with hindsight I'm not sure
> about crash.

I hadn't thought about /var/crash before. Mine is inside the BE but 
now you've mentioned it I think there's something to be said in favour 
of moving it outside the BE so that you have easy access to existing 
crash dumps if you've had to move back to an earlier BE to use a 
workable system after a serious crash.

I also have /var/cache/pkg outside the BE. I don't now if this could 
lead to problems but my reasoning is that it's convenient to have the 
latest cache available if I switch to an earlier BE and need to 
upgrade any packages. I think that should be OK providing both BE's 
use the same major level of the OS but I wonder if I'll have problems 
if I switch from 10.x into a 9.x BE?

-- 
Mike Clarke