On Fri, 17 Feb 2012, Daniel Staal wrote:

It seems to me that partition and mount point are being confused to a degree. There is no reason what is mounted at /usr/home cannot be a separate partition as well as if it were mounted at root. There are some good reasons for the user directories (and perhaps some other data) to be on a separate partition - mostly the reasons relate to ease of back up and migration whether planned or emergency. Arguments about where to mount that partition are not so practical, being more in the philosophic and historical realm. Pick one, recognize not everyone will be on the same page and put appropriate links in.

There may have been a historic reason, but now it is philosophical - trying to keep the system and userland distinction clear. But there are many flaws in the attempted separation. /var for example is the default location for many logs, both system and user, the spools (remember news?), and databases. You really cannot drop /usr into a different system and have an operational result.

(I put the home directories, the www directory, databases and spools all on the same physical partition which I mount arbitrarily at /usr/local/data. It isn't exactly plug-n-play, but in tests and emergencies is has proved practical to drop the partition into several linices with a high level of functionally - depending on application versioning being close to in sync.)