Importance of LVM (was Re: Partitioning criteria revision proposal)

[Kamil Paral]

I think it's way quite late in the cycle to talk about merits and drawbacks of LVM by default. It's quite late for discussing what is a better default. And that's why we should stick to the long term default, that means LVM.

Personally I didn't like (maybe even hated) LVM when I started to work on Fedora. Now I like it. But that doesn't matter. The problem is that this issue was not properly discussed. There should have been a long thread on the lists. Different people should have posted their opinions. Measurements should have been made with regard to the boot time. FESCo should have posted their stance. Et cetera et cetera.

The default was flipped to raw partitions in early builds of F18 Anaconda, and that was unfortunate, because it lacked a proper discussion and announcement (it was quite a surprise for QA). It is still (barely) time to flip the default back, to what it always was. But there's no way enough time to _start_ the discussion now. It would consume weeks and by that time Beta should be out.

I think there are some LVM haters in the community who finally saw a chance to cleanse Fedora of this evil, and now will be very angry if someone wants to revert it. They might be wrong, they might be right. But I don't think this is the discussion we want to have now. That discussion should target Fedora 19. Now we should keep the defaults from previous Fedora versions.