/ must be on a partition or LV that will be formatted. Reusing an existing / is not allowed.

[Kamil Paral]

> It means if you're doing a fresh install, you've got to format
> wherever
> / is going.  You can't install over top of an existing /.  Is that
> what
> you thought it meant?
> 
> - Chris

I imagine this could be very inconvenient for me when switching distributions. I always have / and /home on the same partition. If I want hypothetically to go from let's say Ubuntu to Fedora, I delete all files except /home and then select that partition for /. If you force me to format that partition then I can't easily switch to Fedora, because my /home is huge and I have no external space to back it up.

Of course I *can* solve the problem somehow (borrowing someone's laptop or buying large external disk). But it's inconvenient for me and I really don't understand why the partition formatting must be forced, and I am annoyed at Fedora.

Is this a use case that could influence more people than just me?