[vox] A philosophical question about partitioning

[ME]

Michael Wenk said:
> My opinion is it should be /music
>
> My reasoning is no system directory really makes a whole lot of convincing
> sense, so why not give it its own partition?

Its own partition is a good idea, and a new root space is also fine.

> Also, I'm curious as to why to make it a separate partition?

> Is the data
> going to be on a different drive?  If not, I would place it on the
> partition
> that will grow w/o bounds(for me this would be my /usr partition.)

When building a multiuser system likes this you don't want the users to be
able to fill system space with files. I have not found any Linux
installers that can reliably deal with running out of space during an
install and recover flawlessly.

The "/" partition is often rather small compared to other partitions and
usually only contains a few things-- enough to boot a system by itself in
single user mode.

If /music were not a separate partition from "/" then /music risks letting
users use up system space. This can cause an upgrade/update to fail.

Similar things can be said about /usr space.

/var/log is often a separate partition on my systems because runaway logs
should not interfere with stopping mail delivery, cron jobs and other
funtions that depend on /var space.

In general, it is good to make "places users can write data" into separate
partitions from system space like /home and /tmp.

These could easily be symlinks to a single giant space that is shared by
users.

It is also possible to have per partition quotas.

But no matter what a user does in the spaces the may write to, any user
can't harm your update through lack of system space in /usr, /, etc.

-ME