default partition scheme without /home - why ?

[Yaakov Nemoy]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 8:30 AM, James Hubbard <jameshubbard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 6:10 AM, Benny Amorsen <benny+usenet at amorsen.dk> wrote:
>
>  I used to do that for my desktop and laptop.  Those that really need a
>  separate /usr and /var already know who they are, what they need, and
>  how to set those up.  I don't believe that the default needs to set
>  those up.
>
>  For most desktop users especially new ones that need just the regular
>  setup, it's probably not important.  I've been recommending to our
>  sysadmins and users setting up their own system, to use a separate /
>  and /home partition for about 3 years now. I usually just tell them to
>  give 10-15GB of space to /.
>
>  As others have mentioned, it makes a re-install with a format of /
>  easy to do.  On my own system, I'm just using 5.6GB of the 15GB that
>  I've set aside for /.  I move data that's not important to keep in
>  home over there whenever home starts getting full.

Doing Smolt devel work ordinarily doesn't take alot of space.
Uncompresesd though, working with a copy of the production data can
take over 10GB in /var alone.  Ideally, I should be mounting /var
somewhere different too.  If I had a desktop, I would probably have a
small but fast HD dedicated to it, but I prefer laptops.

>  Just the fact that there are so many emails and differing ideas about
>  what a / and /home default partitioning  means that whatever is chosen
>  probably won't make everyone happy.  As the novice moves to a more
>  intermediate level, they'll figure out what they need or want and do
>  it themselves.  Those that don't care to know more will probably be
>  happy with single / partition.
>

An ordinary user isn't necessarily Aunt Tillie and her Amazing Flea
Circus, but rather some with his or her unique needs.  There are a
million people coming from Windows who were told that Linux is better
for Java or Ruby development.  They come for the Compiz and stay for
the LAMP.  They may try convincing coworkers to use Fedora as well.
These people are technical minded, but don't have the time to futz
around with partitions either.  I think before Fedora is ready to
conquer the home market, we need to be able to conquer the power user
who has very little extra time on his hands.

Does this mean we should abandon a more logical layout, such as
splitting / and /home?  I don't think so.  I think that it simply
should be well documented.  At risk of introducing bloat, I would
suggest that to make this a feature we would need a SIG.  This SIG
would then work on a 'Hardware - Status' daemon, that monitors things
like the hard drive level.  If it sees the / partition bloat up
suddenly, it can try to figure out which application is doing it, and
recommend a basic solution.  Then it could pop up and tell the user
'some application is writing lots of data to /var.  /var is prone to
rapid size changes, and is written to often.  For more information
about /var, click <link>here</link>.  The most basic solution is
simply to add space to /var, and here is how to do it.  Etc...'

Most people aren't going to deviate heavily from the default setting,
so such advice would still be useful.

Just my (increasingly devalued) 0.02 USD

-Yaakov