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

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 10:28:35AM -0600, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> 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?

All those are interesting questions, and we will have to work out the
details.  How it could work is that /usr is still a real physical
directory, and you attach a filesystem to it.  Then you install shadowfs
on top of /, merging in /usr. Then all writes to /usr/.... would still
go to the physical /usr.  Something like that.

However, note that all this is a work around specifically for Debian and
other legacy stuff.  Eventually, we should do the right thing and put
each package in its own directory, /package/foo/
Then /bin would be the union of all /package/*/bin etc.
I am not really convinced that using shadowfs to union /usr onto / is
sucha bright idea.  Slicing it the other way appears to be better.  But
that requires much more thought and code.

By slicing it differently this way, you have a lot more flexibility.

Thanks,
Marcus