[plug] Debian 3.0

[Craig Ringer]

Brian Tombleson wrote:
>>It is possible, especially on "home" systems, to get away with unifying
>>/var with / - most useful if you don't have much in the way of disk
>>space. You can also get away with having /usr on / but I'm reluctant to
>>do this usually.
> 
> 
> My oppinion on this is that /var should be separated before /usr because
> filling up /usr is an administrative choice - ie, installing software while
> /var can fill up with a sub-system failure (logs, caches, spools, etc).
> 
> I treat /var as "anything that changes regularly" - including web sites if
> you're hosting - and should be allowed to fill up without killing the system
> completely.

Good point. I think I got my thinking backwards somewhere. In practice 
on systems with little disk space I generally share a single partiton 
between /home and /var by having "home" and "var" come off the 
partition's "root" directory and then bind-mounting the home and var 
dirs from the partition's mount point to /home and /var. Of course that 
way a big user download can break logging so it is far from ideal that 
way either - but better than filling up root and hence (for most people) 
/tmp. The reason I'll unify /home and /var on cramped systems is that it 
can be very hard to know ahead of time how disk space demands will be 
distributed between these two filesystems, while /usr etc are normally 
quite predictable.

-- 
Craig Ringer
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