Useless legacies

“I always fine it at least fascinating, the religiousness (and
this is most definitely not a compliment, coming from an atheist)
with which some people stand to defend “classical” (or, in my
opinion more properly, “legacy”) choices in the Unix world. I also
tend to not consider them too much; I have “challenged the use of
separate
/boot”:http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2007/11/02/why-people-insist-on-using-boot
over two years ago, and I still stand behind my opinion: for the
most common systems’ configurations, /boot is not useful to stay
separate. Of course there are catches.

“One particular of these catches is that you need to have /boot
on its own partition to use LVM for the root file system, and that
in turn is something you probably would like to have standing to
today’s standards, so that you don’t really have to choose how much
space to dedicate to root, which heavily depends on how much
software you’d be going to put on it. Fedora has been doing that
for a while, but then it diverges the problem to how much space
dedicate to /boot, and that became quite a problem with the update
11→12,… in general, I think the case might be building
up for either using a separate /boot, or just use EFI, which as far
as I can tell, can solve the problem to the root… no pun
intended.

“For some reason, it seems like a huge lot of legacies relate to
filesystems, or maybe it’s just because filesystems are something I
struggle with continuously, especially for what concerns combining
the classical Unix filesystem hierarchy with my generally less
hierarchical use of it. I’m not going to argue for not splitting
the usual /usr out of the root file system here (while it’s
something I definitely would support, that pretty artificial split
makes the whole system startup a messy problem), nor I’m going to
discuss how to divide your storage space to file in the standard
“legacy” hierarchy.”

Complete
Story