Re: /usr/share

[Andreas Tille <tille@physik.uni-halle.de>]

On 17 Mar 1999, John Goerzen wrote:

> As I recall, the whole idea behind /usr/share, and indeed /usr itself, 
> is that it can be NFS-mounted in a read-only fashion by other
> computers on a network.  This is certainly a great idea, but I have to 
> ask: why does Debian not support this?
It's a very interesting question.  In fact you can dive deeper that
you can say also /usr could be shared between boxes of the same
architecture and I did so with two poor 486 Linux boxes which got
their /usr from an NFS-mounted HP server.  It was in fact really
tricky to install (dpkg uses df to determine diskspace, because
of the long path the diskspace value swapped over to the next line so
I had to install a patched df) and to get /etc in sync.  I did
helped me with lots of symlinks in the /etc directory but it
was a dirty hack and not what Debian is supposed to be:  A perfectly
clean system.

I think we should work on this problem.

Kind regards

     Andreas.