default partition scheme without /home - why ?

[Chris Snook]

Valent Turkovic wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 5:31 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Brendan Conoboy wrote:
>>  > Benjamin Kreuter wrote:
>>  >> Perhaps we could create a new option, like "Recommended layout for
>>  >> desktops," that uses a reasonable estimate of what the partition
>>  >> layout should be.  If a user wants to change that, they can (and they
>>  >> can always "review and modify" the partition layout), and they can
>>  >> always resize later if they need to.  New users are often unsure of
>>  >> what the partition layout is, and unfortunately, they often fail to
>>  >> read the install guide.
>>  >
>>  > People can always resize / later and add a /home.  Every system needs a
>>  > / but not every system needs a /home.  Is there a strong technical
>>  > reason for a default /home?  Would that same reason also apply toward a
>>  > separate /usr and /var and /var/tmp?  Please, lets not get nostalgic for
>>  > SunOS 4 partitioning!
>>
>>  Most partitioning decisions are about controlling the sizes separately
>>  or when you want to put different operations like the logging or
>>  database files in /var and user files in /home on different physical
>>  drives to eliminate head contention.  You might want to separate both of
>>  those from the OS files and swap, but using different partitions on the
>>  same drive (and probably LVM) just makes the seeks take longer.
>>
>>  --
>>    Les Mikesell
>>     lesmikesell at gmail.com
>>
> 
> I saw few times that some users put too much stuff in their home
> folder and fill their HDD until there was 0 free space, and their
> machines didn't boot after that - separate /home fixes that.
> 
> I'm talking about Live CD and desktop users.
> 
> Valent.
> 

For the purpose of the initscripts, simply increasing the reserved 
blocks percentage will fix this, but I promise you that will piss off a 
lot of people.  This doesn't help your target user anyway, since 
Gnome/KDE will be very unhappy when /home is full.

-- Chris