Bug#652275: Guided partitioning should not offer separate /usr, /var, and /tmp partitions; leave that to manual partitioning

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> writes:

> In all of the recent discussions about separate /usr partitions, most
> people seem to acknowledge them as unusual, special-purpose
> configurations, even those who use them.  To the extent they have a use
> at all, they primarily have a use for people who have very specific
> reasons for wanting them, and all of those people will know how to
> handle partitioning.  To a lesser extent, that holds true for having
> separate partitions for /var, /tmp, or other top-level directories.  It
> seems likely that any such setup will have custom requirements.

I don't think these things are alike.  Separating /var and /tmp from the
rest of the file systems is done because those partitions contain varying
amounts of data and often fill if something goes wrong, but can fill
without impacting the rest of the system and allowing easy recovery if
they're not on the same partition as everything else.

Separating /var continues to be good and recommended practice if you're
running anything that's likely to produce a lot of output, IMO.  (/tmp
should probalby just be tmpfs, but that's another discussion.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>