On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 11:23 AM, Stephen Harris lists@spuddy.org wrote:
_TODAY_ (where I have an MMC card in my wallet that's almost 1000 times bigger than that old hard disk!) the rationale for a / and /usr split is a lot less.
No it isn't. There are still good reasons to not require unnecessary stuff on your boot device in spite of the fact that you've managed to
Your boot device can be (typically is) different to your root device. And even if you really meant "root" then this merger moves stuff _off_ the root disk and puts it onto /usr. Properly done /usr can still be a separate partition, if desired; initrd just needs to mount it.
You aren't done booting until you complete the init scripts for runlevel 1. Having to have an extra copy of the kernel on yet another device to even get started seems wrong from a minimalist approach, and the need for sufficient ram for an initrd even more so. And you really should be able to mount /usr via nfs while retaining independent boot/diagnostic capability.
So this proposal can make the root disk _smaller_ than it currently is.
What's the problem with just following $PATH?