default partition scheme without /home - why ?

[Brendan Conoboy]

Matthew Miller wrote:
> Sure -- law of the universe: data expands to fill available storage. This is
> inevitable with one big messy partition too.

With one big "messy" partition it happens later.  No partitioning scheme 
is going to solve that problem :-)

> In half? How are you doing this, exactly?

Hypothetical distribution.  Lets say I have a dual boot system with an 
80GB drive, half for Windows, half for Linux.  A 20GB / leaves 20GB for 
/home.

The bottom line is that when you carve out a separate /home from / you 
run out of space faster, no matter how good your heuristic is for a 
certain amount on / and a certain amount on /home.  If somebody can put 
forth a mechanism where this isn't true, my objection to a separate 
/home is likely to vanish.

> Yeahhhh, not always viable.

Upgrades aren't always viable, but it's often an option.

>> 2) Have anaconda selectively rm -rf, leaving directories like /home, 
>> /var/lib/xen and so forth alone.
> 
> Not pretty, but an interesting suggestion. 

Indeed, I only see two problems with it:

1. It's slow.

2. There's a lesser guaranty of file system integrity.  You can fsck 
before and after, but that goes back to problem 1.

-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com