Thread: [Under consideration] Remove 256MB limitation of the rootfs partition in the N900
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slaapliedje is offline slaapliedje
2010-02-10 , 00:11
Posts: 466 | Thanked: 418 times | Joined on Jan 2010
#37
Please learn what FHS is and how it fits in here. Seriously. Anything that is packaged for a distribution on a regular desktop GNU/Linux system DOES NOT belong in /opt

/opt itself is mostly a historical feature or used by anything that can't/won't be packaged(think proprietary software like DB2, Oracle etc...).

Yes I am well aware of what /opt on maemo does but it doesn't mean I agree with it.

As for /usr/local... yes it's there for things an admin would install... but in this case it could be abused.

Also looking at other systems like BSDs /usr/local is where their packages install by default. Most things out of /usr/local are part of the core system. And this would probably fit maemo more as it would be more true.
Ruskie is correct, with the exception that most Linux distributions put everything that is in the package manager in /usr, whereas if it's not managed by the package manager, it should go into /usr/local.

Maemo is NOT a regular desktop system, even though I wish it was more similar...
There is no authority which can enforce the FHS. It's just a guideline.
Titan, while it's technically not a regular desktop system, it basically is a regular Debian based distribution, and putting things in /opt is wrong. While I have seen a lot of distributions deviate from the LSB, almost all of them within the last 10 years have adhered to the FHS. Why? Because the FHS kicks ***, and is USEFUL, and will be useful with my suggestion.

Which is this;

The 256mb should hold / and /sbin, /bin, /root and that is it. That should be ALL that needs to be mounted initially for a Linux machine to boot (I could be missing one, but I'm not sure.)

/usr/bin and /usr/sbin do NOT need to be on the same partition as the one that boots, it can be mounted later. You can even mount it over a network and have all your maemo apps on your server (of course that would be useless when you were out on the road!) /var should be on that separate partition as well.

Most of the space currently that is sucking up the space with the optified packages is more than likely in /var, which is where your apt-get puts files (specifically /var/lib/dpkg/info/. This is where all the deb scripts go after a package is installed). This alone would help a huge amount. The other place that a lot of files go is /usr/share (at least on a normal Linux system). This keeps things clean.

It's one thing to base your distribution off of Debian for apt-get goodness, it's something else to use it and completely ignore the debian packaging guidelines (like Ubuntu Devs tend to do now and again)

It's crazy that they only gave us 256mb for our root file system, Honestly how much more of a cost of production would it have been if they had made that 512mb?

slaapliedje