Re: history (Was Re: Corel/Debian Linux Installer)
On Wed, 15 Sep 1999, Jonathan Walther wrote:
> drives. But given they are in such a vast minority, the current scheme of
> providing sensible defaults and popping the installer into a tool for
> creating your own arbitrary partition scheme is really the best.
> (at least, Im ASSUMING we do that the same as FreeBSD... I haven't installed
> Debian in a while. Just duplicated already working drives)
You say this, but all almost every single one of my drives >120MB
(3.6GB, 6GB, 9GB, 13.5GB, 17GB) are partitioned into a single huge
Linux partition (and 256MB swap) -- I thought and hard about this,
and I have yet to have come across a time where having several
partitions would have been easier.
Initially, when I setup the first large multi-user system that I
admin, I *did* split it into lots of little bits (on a 6GB disk).
This was a *nightmare* -- bits of /usr were symlinked into /home;
bits of /var were symlinked into /usr, and so on. I had constant
nightmares trying to distribute the disk load evenly and ensure
free space was there all around, so when I finally reinstalled it
(after 4 years) with Debian, I left both of its disks as single
huge partitions, so that it now has 8GB / and 6GB /home, and I've
been happier.
I'm not especially bothered about the fsck time -- this box goes
down only 3 or 4 times a year, if that. Backups are taken
(over the network), and if my data crashes on the system, then
I'll reconstruct from that.
With the (good) Debian policy of fully integrating packages into
the /usr, /var tree (rather than just leaving them in a heap),
saving /var at the expense of /usr wouldn't be terribly useful,
anyway.
So, er, what reasons are there (for me, at least, and I think
I'm fairly typical of small--medium size system admins) for
splitting?
--
Chris <chris@fluff.org> ( http://www.fluff.org/chris )
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