Bug#672523: please include "preserve /home" functionality
> I'm less convinced. Debian is meant for being upgraded easily, so
> dooing a "clean reinstall" is not really that a benefit. But, still,
Right, once, you have a clean debian install sure you just upgrade.
Yet, "preserve /home" (or rather del sys-files) provides a nice
way to get to the point of a clean debian install, from another
distro, an unsupported release, or otherwise unclean or corrpted
system in a single filesystem setup (those getting more common with
btrfs?).
> > And this even seems to suggest there might already exist debian-installer
> patches:
> > https://wiki.edubuntu.org/komputes/HowToDebianInstallerPreserveHome
>
> I don't really see where this page suggests this. It gives a step by
> step method, using the "manual partitioning" method....which I think
> is logical for such purpose.
Yes, as the spec stated the UI difference is rather subtle. The debian-installer
message one can see on that page is:
"The file system on /dev/sda1 assigned to / has not been marked for formatting.
Directories containing system files (/boot, /etc, /usr, /var, ...) that already exist
under any defined mountpoint will be deleted during the install."
However, when I tried this with the squeeze debian-installer, it told me the
targed is "unclean" and warned about possible conflicts, which will of course
occur if the old system files are not deleted. (Clearly a different behavior.)
> What exactly would you like to see changed?
I would like to see the same "system files will be deleted" behavior in debian.
>From the screen shots it seems some patches should already exist for the
debian-installer to support this, but my tests showed they are not applied
in debian. I have looked for a repo where the patches may be available,
but could not locate them.
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