default partition scheme without /home - why ?

[Les Mikesell]

Brendan Conoboy wrote:
>
>>> 1) Use the upgrade option.
>>
>> Is that supported?
> 
> AFAIK, yes.  The only "iffy" upgrade mechanism is to online update 
> fedora-release then use yum to handle the package upgrade for you 
> (Though this generally works fine for me)

And is this documented as being supported?

  >> Is there any historical evidence for this?  Surely there have been
>> unix-like systems that have defaulted to a different partitioning 
>> scheme before.  And certainly some that performed version upgrades 
>> without reformatting.
> 
> Friendly version upgrades (much less installations) are a relatively new 
> phenomenon. 

For free things, perhaps.

  Everything other than Linux/*BSD that I can recall using
> would format and reinstall.  SunOS, for instance, would normally have 
> partitions for /, /usr, /var, /tmp, /opt, and more.  Sometimes I think 
> the desire to add more partitions to Linux systems stems from the 
> superstition formed in the days before large hard drives were common 
> (that does not appear to be the case in this thread).

I remember doing an tape upgrade of AT&T 3b2's from SysVr2 to SysVr3 
that automatically fixed up all of the (moderately large) differences
in the installed version and came up with everything working the same - 
well over a decade ago.  The only machine that had a problem was one 
where I had too many things starting automatically out of inittab for 
the updated process limit.

Apple OS-X upgrades have also been fairly painless - and they also have 
a nice strategy for migrating to a new machine.  All macs will act as 
firewire targets, so you just connect your new machine to the old one 
and it sees it as a firewire drive and offers to migrate your users, 
applications and data over, taking care of version differences on the 
fly.  This also works if you have done a backup to an external firewire 
drive, re-installed the OS, then want to migrate your old setup back.

A tool like this might be the friendliest long term solution if you 
could design something that would do a backup of your existing system to 
an external drive or a network destination in a format that could either 
be used to restore the existing system or as the source for migrating 
users, data, and non-packaged applications (i.e. your /opt and 
/usr/local/) back into a freshly installed  newer version.  That would 
require some additional space somewhere but could be pretty flexible and 
would eliminate any partitioning dependencies.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com