RichardET said:
I am just curious - why does FreeBSD have the /home partition under /usr?
There doesn't seem to be a straight answer for that.
In general the theory behind
/usr was basically to separate the files which were more aimed at the end user(s) from the binaries which were only of interest for the maintenance of the system. As such programs like
fsck,
mount or
mknod all live in
/sbin whereas
/usr/sbin contains files such as
chroot,
cron and
portsnap.
And there you immediately see a grey area. Because I can easily come up with arguments why
portsnap might be better placed in
/sbin. Or take
nologin for that matter, even though some of the other shells reside in
/bin.
But going back to the original question: my theory would be to separate user data from system data. Also because this approach might better allow you to divide space. You can keep
/ relatively small and locate most of your storage to
/usr where the majority of your data will live (think
ports,
src,
home and maybe even
doc).
This is a good read; it seems this has somewhat recently been discussed on the mailing lists.
RichardET said:
Usually, on other systems, it is just /home, although I realize that Solaris used /export/home.
Yeah, but Solaris was even more 'arcane' than FreeBSD. Because
/export really meant just that. The file system was actually being exported in an NFS like manner while
/home was under control from the auto mounter.
The theory behind that one, though very logical in my opinion, was to make sure that it wouldn't matter if you were using local or remote storage; the home directory would always be available under
/home.
And it quite matched too, because instead of using
/usr/local Solaris mostly relied on
/opt.
