y...@marupa.net grabbed a keyboard and wrote: > On Wednesday, February 05, 2014 08:27:15 AM David Guntner wrote: >> Can't speak for him, but for me it's a segmenting issue. If I have to >> wipe / for example, I'm not wiping things in /usr or /usr/local (where >> my locally-installed programs go) unless I have to, or even /home. Of >> course, there's no reason to want to protect /home from an install that >> wants to format the / partition, right? :-) >> > > Separate /usr is unneeded and actually complicates boot for little benefit. > Most Linux distributions rely on /usr being present before the end of > the early userspace.
I've been doing it that way for 20+ years on any *NIX system (including
different distributions of Linux) I've been involved with, and have
never once had any kind of complication or problem with it. It's there,
it gets mounted, it gets used.
The only problem I've had was with trying to do a separate /etc
partition once. Oops. *That* one made for interesting times. I think
I had to reformat and repartition after that one. :-) Since it was a
fresh install, it just wasted a bit of time.
> Preserving /usr between installations is a bad idea because
> you'll have all your software MINUS any information on any of it being
> installed available to your package manager. This means one reinstall later
> you're basically stopped from even upgrading most of it, can't remove it with
> the manager, etc.
And when I'm doing something that requires it, I tell the installer to
format the /usr partition as well. Not that hard to do. :-)
> Separate /home is a must for me, though. That's the number one thing to
> persist between not only installations, but machines. Best thing to put on a
> dedicated hard disk if you can.
Yup. But even if on the same physical disk, it makes way too much sense
to have a separate /home to not do it.
--Dave
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