general rules for partitioning

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2005 at 07:47:43PM +0900, Joel wrote:
> > (And this is why there's /srv, by the way. /var/www is icky.)
> Why do you think so? 

For the same reason we don't put user files in /var/home. See the rationale
for /var in the FHS:

   /var contains variable data files. This includes spool directories and
   files, administrative and logging data, and transient and temporary
   files.


Web server content is generally none of these. Often, it's static, important
user data. The FHS defines /var/www as specifically for "WWW proxy or cache
data".

Really, anything a normal user might want to get at with a text editor
oughtn't be in /var. Or to put it in a way that's relevant to this thread :)
anything that's vital to preserve across upgrades. (Old logs are nice, but
not usually vital -- if they *are*, better to write them to a log server
which would store them somewhere safe.)

Things that aren't quite perfect I can work around: I deliver mail to
maildir in users' home directories, avoiding problems with /var/mail. And
that pretty much leaves user crontabs as an annoyance.



-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
Current office temperature: 74 degrees Fahrenheit.