what's a BE (related to Where do user files go these days?)

[doug]

On Sun, 9 Nov 2014, Arthur Chance wrote:

> On 09/11/2014 12:15, Matthew Seaman wrote:
>> 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.

>> 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.
>
> 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.

What's a BE?

There are no dumb questions, its the people who ask them :)