default partition scheme without /home - why ?

[Brendan Conoboy]

Les Mikesell wrote:
>> 1) Use the upgrade option.
> 
> Is that supported?

AFAIK, yes.  The only "iffy" upgrade mechanism is to online update 
fedora-release then use yum to handle the package upgrade for you 
(Though this generally works fine for me)

>> 2) Have anaconda selectively rm -rf, leaving directories like /home, 
>> /var/lib/xen and so forth alone.
> 
> That could be a reasonable option.

Yeah, technically very easy.  A bit slow though.  Especially if you want 
  to fsck afterward- just in case.

>> 4) Have a backup system that you can restore from.
> 
> A backup isn't really a backup if it becomes your only copy as you erase 
> the real thing.

True- keep two :-)

> Is there any historical evidence for this?  Surely there have been 
> unix-like systems that have defaulted to a different partitioning scheme 
> before.  And certainly some that performed version upgrades without 
> reformatting.

Friendly version upgrades (much less installations) are a relatively new 
phenomenon.  Everything other than Linux/*BSD that I can recall using 
would format and reinstall.  SunOS, for instance, would normally have 
partitions for /, /usr, /var, /tmp, /opt, and more.  Sometimes I think 
the desire to add more partitions to Linux systems stems from the 
superstition formed in the days before large hard drives were common 
(that does not appear to be the case in this thread).

Here's an alternate suggestion:

Whenever there is a second drive in the system with available space, 
make it default to being /home.

Or:

Perhaps smolt data could be tapped to see how many people have a 
separate /home on the same physical volume as /.  If it's a large 
segment of the install base, that's a good indication that making such a 
change would be popular, if nothing else.

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