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

[Karel Volný]

On Wednesday 19 of October 2011 18:52:31 Adam Williamson wrote:
> 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.

you forget the condition that LVM is (better say "could be") 
simple only if *all* distros you use support that ...

I don't know Kamil's exact usecase, but in general, if you have 
just one disk, which I guess is the majority case, why to bother 
with creating multiple partitions then resize them "just because 
you can do it with LVM"?
(no need to answer this question ...)

> > 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...

but that is not the thing Kamil called "smart" ;-)

K.

-- 
Karel Volný
QE BaseOs/Daemons Team
Red Hat Czech, Brno
tel. +420 532294274
(RH: +420 532294111 ext. 8262074)
xmpp kavol at jabber.cz
:: "Never attribute to malice what can
::  easily be explained by stupidity."
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