Re: [gentoo-user] why does revdep-rebuild object to mounting /var on /mnt/var ?

[Alan McKinnon]

On 10/09/2013 18:57, gottlieb@×××.edu wrote:
>> I'm curious as to why you do that, I can't see any benefit at all.
>> >
>> > The "var" filesystem is an LV and is only useful if it is mounted at
>> > /var where packages expect it to be. Why add the extra complexity  of
>> > mounting it somewhere else and then bind mounting it to the pnly place
>> > it can be useful?
> An old habit/belief that mounts go in /mnt.  Since both revdep-rebuild
> and you believe this is a bad habit, I now mount directly on /var /opt.

Ah, OK.

Technically a mount can go anywhere. Permanent mounts just go where they
are supposed to go, and /mnt was a throwback to the bad old days where
everything else was mounted at /mnt/<something>, including cdroms,
filesystems you wanted to access quickly, windows partitions on a dual
boot machine etc etc. or the gentoo partition during install before your
chroot

Then removeable media started being mounted in /media where the GUI
could manage it and not have to deal with root-only permissions in /mnt

Nowadays media goes in /run/media....

All very confusing and hard to keep up with. It's like trying to figure
out what politicians and your boss happen to be talking about today :-)



>
>> > There's rules of thumb about this that will always work:
>> >
>> > No object in /tmp can be expected to survive successive invocations of
>> > the program that created the object, and never survive a reboot;
>> > No object in /var/tmp can be expected to survive a reboot
>> >
>> > The best place for temp files, ironically, is ~
> I set tmpwatch and wipe_tmp so that files survive in /tmp and /var/tmp
> for a month.
>
> I don't like ~ for temp files since on some, admittedly rare, occasions
> I actually use the gnome gui file manager and don't want a huge ~.  I
> have long ago created ~/tmp (also cleaned after a month by tmpwatch) so
> the only problem is breaking the habit of placing short-term files in
> /tmp instead of ~/tmp.

OK, I get it. I'd write all that temp stuff to /var/tmp so it doesn't
get nuked by something cleverly trying to manage /tmp.

I often feel the same way about ~/.xsession-errors.
I have to restrain myself from symlinking it to /dev/null :-)

> I realize that habit is bad for my (system's) health, but still find it
> hard to break.  I shall try again. Perhaps this is very mild form of
> what intelligent smokers feel :-).

There is no such thing as an intelligent smoker; there are only stupid
smokers :-)

I'm a two-packs-a-day man myself, I speak from many years experience!


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com