Very Computer

> > Trying to make room for gcc, I wish to minimize the contents of /usr.

> Stepping to a different problem briefly, I would submit that you're
> going about that the wrong way.  Of course I don't know your situation,
> but my painful experience (and that of my old mentors) has taught me
> this:  when installing third-party software in /usr/local, leave /usr
> the hell alone.

> Our /usr/local's are /always/ a separate partition, or mounted remotely.
> (Yes, there is irony in /usr/*LOCAL* being a *REMOTE* partition.)  When
> performing an OS upgrade, some OS'es tend to shuffle the contents of
> /usr about, under the assumption that the contents of the /usr drive
> are theirs to play with as they wish.

> That's a valid assumption, actually... but anyhow, don't take the
> chance.  Put all the /usr/local stuff on a different partition, that
> way you can always just unmount it and let the OS go get medieval on
> the core /usr space, and then remount /usr/local secure in the knowledge
> that nothing will have been touched.

> (As a student assistant to some sysadmins once, I thought this was
> paranoia until a few years later, when I watched somebody else lose
> /usr/local entirely when they failed to split the two up and then did
> some OS rev'ing.  Ouchies.)

> Well, there's my two timeslices.

> As far as your original question goes:

> > Can everything be moved out and then merely linked back to /usr ? If
> > some things cannot be moved/linked, why not ?

> Well, there's a thread in here about somebody renaming /usr itself,
> and to some extent those lessons apply to the contents of /usr as well.
> I suppose that if all you use are the tools in /usr/sbin/static, you
> might be able to do a fair amount of shuffling.

> > If not what "can" be moved out, period; and, what might be
> > moved/linked back, if this is a possibility ?

> I've never had a problem with shuffling /usr/share/man around and then
> moving it back.  Often the client systems which are low on diskspace
> get their /usr/share/man deleted and then mounted read-only from the
> very-diskful server.  This usually doesn't cause a problem, since
> those machines aren't exactly used for reading man pages.  Sure makes
> patching man pages easier.

> That's the only location I've ever tried to mess with /after/ an
> installation, and that's only because they're a bunch of text files,
> and MANPATH is friendly.  I expect that other text-only places like
> /usr/include and non-essentials like /usr/java could be moved and
> symlinked, but I'm not going to recommend it.

> If you touch /usr/lib, of course, you deserve what you get, and the
> rest of us will laugh at you behind your back.  :-)

> --

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