FreeBSD, FHS, and /mnt/cdrom

[Frank Murphy]

On Friday 21 November 2003 6:36, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> >  Could you also explain to me why you think that /var would be such
> > a bad place for this?
>
> Well, I probably can't give a hard and fast absolute reason, but...
> We use /var as a place for directoreis/files that can grow somewhat
> unexpectedly and weakly controlled, such as spool and logs, etc.
> Because of that, our /var is most often put in some other large
> general filesystem with links and doesn't really live in either
> root (/) or isn't a root located filesystem, but just a directory in
> another filesystem such as /work (or in some recent ones /lump - I
> couldn't think of a better name).   So, making it the home of mount
> points would be rather awkward.
>
> I suspect that some others do similar things with /var.  I have
> heard it mentioned.
>
> I think something similar can be true of other root located file
> systems such as /usr, although for those it is more likely that
> it just be a directory living within /usr that gets moved and linked.

One of the ideas behind this new directory of mount points is that some kind 
of automounter could then create and delete directories someplace as needed 
without affecting anyone. So while not as large in K as a logfile, the 
contents of the directory could get pretty large. (Probably a realistic max 
of 20 items, but enough to rule out leaving it in /.)

Just because /var is a symlink to /lump/var shouldn't affect that.

> Generally, I think mount point directories should be as close to
> root located as possible with as little intervening stuff that could
> possible get shuffled around.
>
> At first blush, it would sound like /mnt would be a likely place, but
> it has been out there too long and been used in too many locally
> unique ways that mounts on or in there could create much unnecessary
> confusion.

I agree. I'd prefer to use /mnt for this, but with the historical usages, it's 
not really possible.

> As far as "any ol' where" goes, that doesn't bother me much, but it
> sounds like what is being asked for is a kind of common place that
> won't cause problems so vendors and third party writers can go ahead
> and make something that will work easily across platforms with the
> least pain - and ain't that what everyone whines so much about - the
> pain of adding devices, etc.    This would be a harmless way to ease
> some of that pain.   And, anyway, if a standard location is adopted
> and if some users want to do it differently on their machines nothing
> would stop them from doing whatever they want with their systems.  It
> would be no worse than if there was no standard and probably easier.

Exaclty.

> Just lets not break a bunch of stuff to do it.
>
> Gee, it's nice to be asked about something like this for a change.

That's why I wanted to ask. Find out how other people are doing this.

Frank