Re: Hurd FS hierarchy (was Re: LD_LIBRARY_PATH troubles)

[Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom]

On Sat, Mar 16, 2002 at 04:21:37PM -0500, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> A lot of
> files in /usr fall neatly into the existing directories in /.  Of
> course, this is not always true, like with /share.  But we break this
> anyway with /hurd and /servers.

my question is; if we want to distinguish between things that were
traditionally in /usr (because they weren't needed at boot time, and could
be mounted read-only via NFS or some other shared FS), and things that were
in / (because they were needed at boot time); but hurd's shadowfs lets you
overmount stuff in (ex.) /usr/bin over /bin; what do you do when you want to
specifically install to one or the other?

say I have /usr/bin union-mounted over /bin (as I understand how this
works). I want to install some software that is needed at boot time, so it
should go in what used to be /bin. how do I avoid installing it to what
would otherwise be /usr/bin, without unmounting that filestore? is shadowfs
smart enough to say 'if the path is /bin, put it on the root store, and if
/usr/bin, put it on the system binaries store'. will the /usr symlink be
retained for this purpose? will shadowfs imply the /usr/bin path? (which
will be really confusing if you don't know that 'cp foo /usr/bin/' will
work, even tho there's no /usr). 

Carl Soderstrom
-- 
Network Engineer
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com