Partitioning criteria revision proposal

[Chris Murphy]

On Oct 16, 2012, at 6:55 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> So I'd be interested in general opinions about whether we should go down
> the path of requiring quite a bit of reliability from custom
> partitioning at Beta stage, or whether we should perhaps dial that down
> a bit, and only really require extensive functionality from custom
> partitioning at Final stage, as we did for F17 and earlier. I'd
> especially be interested in what the anaconda team thinks, so could you
> folks chip in?

I have no issue with a narrow path of working behaviors for a beta. It's a beta. Some things don't work. *shrug* I even tolerate crashes of the installer for beta. What I don't like is data loss. So as long as that remains a show stopper, I'm pretty compliant.

> the Glorious Future maybe belongs
> to btrfs. 


Take a chance. It's only data. There are too many bytes in the world anyway. Just kidding, I haven't lost anything with btrfs, and have in fact committed my 2nd and 3rd backups to it. (I trust the veracity of these more than the primary method, but the primary backup has restore features that are preferred.)

> So I'm not sure we really have a convincing reason
> any more to care especially about LVM.

a.) I'd go farther than this. I personally think for novice, give Fedora a try, users; the users who are argued to be confused by LVM and hence one reason why it's going away in F18 by default, the same arguments apply to why the default requires 3 partitions. I think the default installation should be a single partition: /boot on rootfs, and swapfile, on ext4. The exception is btrfs because it doesn't (maybe won't) support swapfiles, so two partitions would be needed.

b.) Glorious future of btrfs, subvols. Neiether LVM nor partitioning are necessary.

c.) Better than LVM, virtualize. Especially when testing.


Chris Murphy