Bug#372207: Agree that the FHS violation is serious

[Wade Richards]

I also keep a read-only root (including /etc) partition, to minimize the 
chances of accidental file corruption.  I also want to use LVM snapshots 
for my backups, to ensure that they are internally consistent.  Both of 
these seem like reasonable and sensible things.

However, in order to create the snapshots I'm going to use in my 
backup,  I need to re-mount my root partition as writable.  It doesn't 
seem reasonable to me that I need to write to my root partition merely 
to back it up.

I'm not an expert on LVM, but shouldn't tools like pvscan, vgscan, 
vgdisplay, lvscan, lvdisplay, etc. be enough to regain access to your 
/var directory if it is lost?  The metadata is also stored directly in 
the disk structures, is it not?   It will probably be slow, but if I'm 
recovering from a disaster, I don't mind waiting for a while.