default partition scheme without /home - why ?

[Chris Snook]

Valent Turkovic wrote:
> 2008/3/10 Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com>:
>> On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 13:34 +0100, Valent Turkovic wrote:
>>  > Is that on purpose and if it why?
>>
>>  Guessing how much space you'll need in your non /home partitions over
>>  time is difficult.  Only you know how your install will be used.  That's
>>  why the installer defaults to the easiest thing to guess;  How much boot
>>  space you'll need, and how much swap space.  However since you know how
>>  your install is going to be used, you are best to make those estimations
>>  and setup your /home as you want it.
>>
>>  --
>>  Jesse Keating
>>  Fedora -- All my bits are free, are yours?
> 
> Fedora Live CD target audience are desktop users, right? I as a
> desktop user haven't seen any need for / partiton over 8-10 GB.
> Servers, and other fedora usages may need some other partition schemes
> but a default home user has huge benefits from a dedicated /home
> partition.

My ogg/mp3 collection is over 20 GB.  I generally use a 100 GB /home for 
my multiboot workstation boxes.  For my test systems, I often carve out 
root LVs that are just a few GB and use that for everything.  There's no 
magic strategy that works for everyone, and putting everything on / 
allows users to take full advantage of their disk space without having 
to know how everything is carved up underneath.

> It is probable that new users aren't aware that /home partition as a
> dedicated partition has advantages and it would be best if anaconda
> makes the "smart" partition scheme in which /home is a separate
> partition in LVM volume, or a logical partition. Separate home has
> lots of advantages that you are aware of, so why not just change the
> partition scheme to take advantage of that?

Users who don't understand the concept of separate /home partitions are 
not going to be able to take advantage of these benefits.  For them, 
creating a separate /home is just unneeded complexity, and it's 
impossible for us to universally get right.

If you know what you're doing, override the defaults.  That's why we 
have those options in the installer.

If you can come up with a formula that properly handles anything from 2 
GB (You can buy a brand-new EeePC Surf with this) to 1 TB, and correctly 
guesses how many OSes the user plans to multi-boot or virtualize, I'd be 
glad to go with that, but I can pretty much guarantee that it will piss 
off more people than the current default behavior, which cannot possibly 
be wrong, even if it's not always ideal.

-- Chris