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

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2011-10-19 at 07:51 -0400, Kamil Paral wrote:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > Why not have /home as a separate partition? This is the classic
> > reason
> > for doing so. I mean, what you're doing in the above is basically
> > 'faking' a /home partition.
> > --
> > Adam Williamson
> 
> Because I never saw reason to do so. Having / and /home on the same
> partition saves you from problems with insufficient disk space in one
> place and too much space in the second place.

So does LVM, which is exactly why we started using it by default.
Resizing an LVM 'partition' is extremely simple to do and very safe. If
you find you got the sizes of / and /home wrong, just change 'em.

> The only concern I ever had for my layout is whether the next distro
> installer would be smart enough to let me skip formatting of the /
> partition. Therefore I'm not thrilled to see Anaconda go the other
> way.

Anaconda team consider skipping format of / to be a *dumb* thing to do,
not a smart one...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net