default partition scheme without /home - why ?
Brendan Conoboy
blc at redhat.com
Tue Mar 11 14:56:23 UTC 2008
Valent Turkovic wrote:
> You are right, but if you have read other branches of this thread you
> will see that some good ideas have come forth. Like not making /home
> separate if free space <15GB and some similar ones.
Given that with each successive release, Fedora packages take more space
and people install more software, eventually whatever you set aside for
/ is going to run out of room. Is everyone really reinstalling from
scratch so often that cutting your disk space in half is a good idea?
> Also there are some have found a solution to that with "maintainance"
> mode to chich you boot into... and that ideas are also being refined in
> this thread.
Ok, here's an idea: Don't format / when you reinstall. There's a number
of ways you can do this:
1) Use the upgrade option.
2) Have anaconda selectively rm -rf, leaving directories like /home,
/var/lib/xen and so forth alone.
3) Use LVM/Ext3 resizing to salvage /home when doing the format.
4) Have a backup system that you can restore from.
> I agree that there are technical challenges to overcome and my vote is
> always to try to overcome then than to leave them unresolved.
Adding another partition will create social and technical challenges-
more than it solves. What do you do when you outgrow / but /home has
space? What do you do when the reverse happens? Will your average user
have a positive experience doing that? I may not be the typical use
case, but between non-Fedora software under /opt and many GB of xen
images under /var, this sort of default would be a real hindrance for me.
The only solid technical argument I can think of for a separate /home is
to provide encryption for that volume. Even then, that assumes a
certain crypto mechanism and only files under /home are worth encrypting
(which may not be true).
--
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com
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