[LBo] Permanent /home partition

[Brian Reichert]

What follows is my proverbial "2 cents" on the matter:

I just poked about the FHS [1] regarding home directories [2] and see that it
specifies things exactly as they currently are (no surprise there).  I've
thought about what you suggest, to separate config and user data, and I'm not
sure I agree that the advantages are significant enough in my case to be worth
the trouble.  Actually, I rather like having one place with it all in because a
single tar command makes a nice backup of all my stuff.  Sure, restoring just
the file you want can be a bit of a pain that only happens rarely (hopefully!)
and I consider it bad practice to restore directly back into your home
directory because you may accidentally overwrite something.  I always restore
to a temporary location then copy over the files I wish to restore just to be
safe.

To backup your data all by itself with out any configuration files can simply
be done by putting your data in a "data" directory within your home directory.
For instance, in my case, I have /home/rignes/Documents in which I store all my
data in.  Most everything else outside of that is extra stuff that doesn't
really /need/ to be backed up.  I also, by the way, have a no_backup directory
in there to keep things that I don't want to backup.  Things like movie files,
or my install of Unreal Tournament.  My point being, there are other ways that
are simpler to backup just data without changing the standard.  Also, to backup
just your "." files you could just

$ tar cvjf dotfiles.tar.bz2 $(ls -A1 | grep '^\..*')

which should just get dot files and dot directories and their contents.  BTW,
this even avoids trying to backup the . and .. directories.  Oh, if anyone is
interested I can break down what the parts of this command mean and do.  Just
let me know. 

Now, as far as running multiple distributions on a single machine and sharing
the home directory I can't really comment on that.  I always use a spare old
machine here to try out a new distro.  Though, I'm willing to bet that the
number of people overall who have a need to run multiple distributions on a
single machine compared to those who don't is small.  I think that a high
number of them exist on this list though.

Now that my personal opinions are out of the way let me toss out a thing or two
to think about before anyone starts contacting the folks who manage the FHS.
Obviously, changing something in the file system standard can be a painful
prospect until it is complete and widely accepted.  Lets think about the big,
overall picture and really try to answer a few important questions to keep
things in perspective.  Such as:

How many organizations/users would be interested in such a change?  Is the
number small?

What percentage of people/organizations really /want/ to have two separate
locations for their data?  Many probably enjoy the single location concept
because it is simple.

How many software packages would need to be rewritten or recompiled and
packaged?  What of those that will /never/ be rewritten or repackaged but are
still essential to the users/organizations environment?  What provisions must
be in place to deal with these?

How many people, over all, really want to run multiple distros on the same
system while sharing their home directory between each distro?

It's important to list off all the pros and cons to such a change and to think
about things in great depth when changing something this fundamental.  Once all
this analysis would be done the final question would be, "Do the benefits of
this change effect enough people and/or organizations to be worth the
difficulties of implementation?"  Let me also mention the KISS theory (Keep It
Simple Stupid) and say that often the simplest solution is the best one.
Avoiding unnecessary complexity is a good thing.  An overly complex system is
easier to fix, maintain, troubleshoot, and tends to be more stable than a
complex system (think less points for failure).

I have a feeling that in this case the needs met by splitting ones home
directory applies only to a small niche and that the difficulties of
implementation are far more then the benefits gained.

Though, I may suggest that perhaps this concept could
become a project and people who have this need could work together to create
either some software, or highly detailed howto's to split out home directories.

  1. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
  2. http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#HOMEUSERHOMEDIRECTORIES

-- 
Brian Reichert
http://rignesnet.tzo.com

The past always looks better than it was.  It's only pleasant because
it isn't here.
		-- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://88.198.215.82/pipermail/qna/attachments/20060607/6b98f0fd/attachment.pgp