in-place clean installs with one / partition

[Andy Green]

Jeff Vian wrote:

>> I guess if it was my box I would muse about how important the data in 
>> the LVMs was to me, and take steps to back it up if it was that 
>> important.  Then I would use the rescue mode method to destroy /usr, 
>> /etc and /var at least and do an "install" of FC6 (without formatting, 
>> and taking care to list your LVMs in the fdisk part of anaconda).  I 
>> think that will work fine, but then my most deodorant-challenging 
>> adventures usually start that way.

> This is a dangerous way to go.
> A clean install using the same partitions, but doing a format as part of
> the install process does the same as you have been saying, except it
> totally blows away everything on the partition instead of leaving some
> possibly inconsistent parts as you are doing.

Well, /usr is gone, /var and /etc... there are a limited number of 
places for "possibly inconsistent parts" to be hiding out.  At some 
point as that rm -rf line grows longer, the hideouts reach zero, if you 
allow that /home is allowed to remain as-was.  So I don't see why it is 
so "dangerous" other than you need to know what you are doing enough to 
run the rescue mode.

Even the "danger" of hacking out large parts of the install must be 
balanced against the "danger" of telling newbies to use a separate /home 
with LVM, and then guiding them through the potential 
filesystem-trashing complexity of changing partition and LVM sizes and 
growing the filesystem, all because the ran out of space due to the 
artificial limit of their unnecessary partitioning.

For me normally simple upgrade installs have been fine on a normal 
system, or needed minimal fixing up afterwards, and I have not needed 
really clean installs at all with the exception of the case of trying to 
get off Development.

-Andy