/usr/home vs /home

[Polytropon]

On Sat, 18 Feb 2012 13:16:39 +1000, Da Rock wrote:
> On 02/18/12 12:16, Daniel Staal wrote:
> > --As of February 17, 2012 11:46:23 PM +0100, Polytropon is alleged to 
> > have said:
> >
> >> Well, to be honest, I never liked the "old style" default
> >> with /home being part of /usr. As I mentioned before, _my_
> >> default style for separated partitions include:
> >>
> >>     /
> >>     swap
> >>     /tmp
> >>     /var
> >>     /usr
> >>     /home
> >>
> >> In special cases, add /opt or /scratch as separate partitions
> >> with intendedly limited sizes.
> >>
> >> You can see that all user data is kept independently from
> >> the rest of the system. It can easily be switched over to
> >> a separate "home disk" if needed.
> >
> > --As for the rest, it is mine.
> >
> > I'm in agreement with you on that I like to have /home be a separate 
> > partition, and not under /usr.  (Of course, my current zfs system has 
> > 40 partitions...)  Partly though I recognize that I like it because 
> > that's what I'm used to, and how I learned to set it up originally.  
> > (My first unix experience was with OpenBSD, over 10 years ago now.)
> >
> > I've never seen anything listing the main reasons for having /home 
> > under /usr though.  I figure there must be a decent reason why.  Would 
> > anyone care to enlighten me?  What are the perceived advantages?  
> > (Particularly if you then make a symlink to /home.)
> I always thought /usr was like user partition :)

There are two major definitions:

/usr = Unix system resources

/usr = user and system binaries

FreeBSD's explaination can be obtained from "man hier", where
"contains the majority of user utilities and applications" is
provided.

Some UNIX systems, in particular IRIX, if I remember correctly,
also placed the home subtree into the /usr partition, even
though they called it /usr/people...

FreeBSD's reason for making /home@ -> /usr/home is a traditional
thing too, I think. As you said, balancing or estimating disk
sizes can be tricky, so /home and /usr made a deal to reduce
the guessing from 2 to 1. :-)

Historical background needed.



> But seriously, for the pedantic yes, but for a desktop user (at least) 
> having home on /usr partition makes sense - balances space and 
> functionality; plus a lack of nodes on the disk for partitions? Limit 
> was 8 I think.

I think "h" is the last letter, with "b" reserved for swap and "c"
reserved for "the whole partition" (the traditional partitioning
scheme ad0[a-h], I'm not looking at GPT ad0p[0-9*] right now).



> But now with /usr/home if you want to install from ports 
> it can take a few gig, but that can be wasted because you're not always 
> installing from ports, so might as well share space with the home 
> directories and balance that way.

You could, on the other hand, move ports stuff into /home if
there's more space available. You need more space for building
(downloading sources, extraction, compiling etc.) than for the
result that's going to be installed into /usr/local.





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...