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Date: Sun, 9 Nov 2014 20:42:12 +0100
From: Polytropon <freebsd@edvax.de>
To: Matthew Seaman <matthew@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Where do user files go these days?
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On Sun, 09 Nov 2014 12:15:18 +0000, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> I do wonder about the layout generated for home directories by the
> installer nowadays.  It is the case that everything expects user home
> directories to be in /home/username -- except for the layout in the
> installer.

In the _most best optimum_ case, it should not matter,
when $HOME points to the correct location, whereever
that might be. Making a change _afterwards_ isn't just
about setting $HOME to the new location. In my experience,
having actually been trying it, many files in a user's
home directory contain references to that directory,
i. e., you can find the string "/home/bob" in files (!)
even after Bob has been moded to /export/home/bob.
This can cause trouble for application programs run
by the user.



> In fact, having a zroot/usr/home makes managing boot environments more
> complex than it needs to be -- you'ld want /usr/bin and /usr/lib and
> almost certainly /usr/local to be part of a BE, but not /usr/home.
> Having a zroot/home mounted as /home makes so much more sense.

Yes, in regards of ZFS this approach looks less comfortable,
especially because the "separation of program and user files"
has been removed - user files are part of the ZFS structure
that holds the OS and program files.

And as you described, the "functional separation" isn't as
easy as just thinking about /usr or /var, especially in the
context of BEs. ;-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...