Re: [gentoo-user] separate / and /usr to require initramfs 2013-11-01

[Daniel Campbell]

On 09/30/2013 04:31 AM, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On 30/09/2013 01:31, Daniel Campbell wrote:
>
>
>> Curious; how is merging two filesystems done? I don't have a separate
>> /usr and am completely unaffected by this change, but it's somewhat
>> interesting to me. /usr stores some pretty important data on it, and I
>> imagine you'd need to mount it somewhere else in order to move the
>> files from it to /'s /usr dir. Is a Live environment recommended
>> instead? How would you mitigate the leftover partition, assuming it's
>> not adjacent to /'s partition?
>
>
> Because /usr is continually in use, boot using a livecd of your choice.
> In that environment, use fdisk (or whichever *disk you like) to make any
> changes to partitions you know you will need.
>
> Mount your gentoo / somewhere convenient
> Mount your gentoo /usr somewhere convenient
>
> copy the latter over to the former
> edit fstab
> reboot
>
> It really is just a case of moving a large number of files around, but
> because those very files are always in use you have to do it in livecd
> environment.
>
> There's no exact checklist one can follow to guarantee a 100% result
> blindly. Instead, as this is Gentoo, we assume users built their system
> knowing what they were doing and can appropriately deal with their
> config themselves. RAID and LVM for example may need attention, but the
> user is usually equipped to deal with that and knows what t do.
>
>
>>
>> I don't run an initramfs, thankfully, but I keep a pretty simple
>> system in terms of filesystems: /, /boot, and /home.
>>
>
My suspicions were mostly correct, then. If the merge is that simple, I
see no reason not to do it if one doesn't want to roll an initramfs.
However, I imagine moving partitions around in gparted or something
similar would be quite a wait if / and /usr weren't adjacent on the drive.

Thanks for the simple-but-thorough explanation. :)