[oi-dev] Updating Hipster and GUI log-in breakage with mounted ZFS datasets

[Nikola M]

On 02/20/15 12:35 PM, Jim Klimov wrote:
> Thanks for the historic insight, much appreciated and more than I could substantiate while walking with a phone ;)
>
> Just for clarity, in my split-root setups I also do not propose shared /opt - it is a child dataset of a rootfs and so is atomically versioned just like other dirs that can contain system packages. I do also maintain that an rpool should be self-sufficient to boot a running system that one can log into remotely (even if a separate userdata pool has failed for example), so my shared datasets for system data like /var/* stuff generally reside under rpool/SHARED/*.
>
> Nothing forbids however to extend the logical filesystem tree with other directories - and shared datasets - such as /opt/netbeans in my recently published screenshot, or some /opt/firefox for Nikola - where the software lifecycle and versioning is managed outside the OS image (manually built, or binary tarballs, or a non-OS type of package, etc.)
>
> Separate datasets even for parts of the core OS image still do make sense for separation of dataset options - compression, quotas, snapshot schedules, etc. And even more so for non-core-OS stuff (e.g. snapshot the /opt/firefox or /opt/netbeans, roll up an upgrade, test it, and rollback if you don't like or kill the old snap to save space - all separately from the OS package lifecycle).

Hi, following your insightful discussion, I removed practice of 
momunting /opt to separate dataset,
but employed mounting only sub-direcories of /opt (/opt/sfw , /opt/Adobe 
etc) as separate datasets.
I embraced practice of using rpool/SHARED/dir datasets for shared 
sub-directories between BE's.
Thanks! :)

I will test updating from August 2014 Hipster 2014.1 to Hipster 20141010 
(newest 2014.1) and see if it goes right and report it how it behaves 
during update Thus far, no complaints from running BE.

I also believe that split-root installs are great and needed thing for 
serious system installs and I like using that OS ability. Thank you Jim, 
for telling us about it! ;)