default partition scheme without /home - why ?

[Brendan Conoboy]

Valent Turkovic wrote:
> You are right, but if you have read other branches of this thread you 
> will see that some good ideas have come forth. Like not making /home 
> separate if free space <15GB and some similar ones.

Given that with each successive release, Fedora packages take more space 
and people install more software, eventually whatever you set aside for 
/ is going to run out of room.  Is everyone really reinstalling from 
scratch so often that cutting your disk space in half is a good idea?

> Also there are some have found a solution to that with "maintainance" 
> mode to chich you boot into... and that ideas are also being refined in 
> this thread.

Ok, here's an idea: Don't format / when you reinstall.  There's a number 
of ways you can do this:

1) Use the upgrade option.

2) Have anaconda selectively rm -rf, leaving directories like /home, 
/var/lib/xen and so forth alone.

3) Use LVM/Ext3 resizing to salvage /home when doing the format.

4) Have a backup system that you can restore from.

> I agree that there are technical challenges to overcome and my vote is 
> always to try to overcome then than to leave them unresolved.

Adding another partition will create social and technical challenges- 
more than it solves.  What do you do when you outgrow / but /home has 
space?  What do you do when the reverse happens?  Will your average user 
have a positive experience doing that?  I may not be the typical use 
case, but between non-Fedora software under /opt and many GB of xen 
images under /var, this sort of default would be a real hindrance for me.

The only solid technical argument I can think of for a separate /home is 
to provide encryption for that volume.  Even then, that assumes a 
certain crypto mechanism and only files under /home are worth encrypting 
(which may not be true).

-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com