Does anyone have any reasons why

...would be a bad idea?



As opposed to Slackware's official method:

In case /usr is on a separate partition?

2 members found this post helpful.

arfon,
Slackware's official method (timeconfig) is
Only root partition is mounted when /etc/localtime is used in boot sequence.

1 members found this post helpful.

A symlink won't have a problem with that. (A hard link would.)

Symlink pointing to a filesystem that is not mounted yet?

1 members found this post helpful.

With all the shenanigans systemd/udev gets up to I think we have to accept that the days of the traditional approach of having /usr on a separate partition are behind us. While we can still get away with it doing it now, I'm not sure how sustainable it will be given the general direction the other distro are going in, and techniques like copying the localtime file are going to look increasingly "quaint".

On a similar note, I was recently trying to determine why my soundcard mixer settings weren't being restored by udev on startup. It turned out that it's because I have /var on a separate filesystem and /var/lib/alsa/asound.state isn't available when the udev rules that do the "alsactl restore" are run. So, I'm back to using good old rc.alsa!

2 members found this post helpful.

None of my desktop systems have /usr on a separate partition. ALL of my servers have separate partitions for /usr /var / and a data partition (sometimes /home). The system default behavior on most have been to use a link, but I trust a copy for exactly the reasons given above: "What is /usr is not mounted when that file is needed?". I use separate partitions specifically to make a system harder to break. Linking resources between partitions is setting yourself up for problems.

That said, I am moving my new builds to using /usr on the root partition. Disks are bigger, and /usr does not grow without bound using the newer packages. /var can (the cache stuff for mail, printer, software, etc. drives this behavior), so I still split /var off. If you are not putting /usr on a separate partition, then link away.

The point I was making is that these days, if /usr isn't mounted then 'localtime' is just one of your worries.

I use separate /var, /tmp, /home and various /srv/* filesystems as IMO it makes sense to separate system software from general rw-data activity.

What is the point of separating /usr? In the old days it was for NFS mounting across a cluster or for support of diskless hosts. Unless you're still doing something like that I see no point in making your life complicated. But, each to their own...

1 members found this post helpful.

That's an excellent reason!