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

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

On 12/17/2011 05:12 AM, Josh Triplett wrote:
> And while we might
> debate the usefulness of a separate /usr back and forth, I think I can
> safely say that it won't become a *recommended* configuration anytime
> soon. :)

I do recommend a separate /usr to anyone. It's *not* safe to say that,
and I know many people that agree with me. To me, it has, and still is,
the best choice. You have no rights to arbitrary decide what should
be/was/will be the recommended configuration. Your choice is not more
valid than mine, and (computer) science isn't about majorities anyway.

On 12/17/2011 05:12 AM, Josh Triplett wrote:
> For the installer, "easy" represents a significant component of
> "do the job and do it well".
> Sure; see below for a more detailed suggestion along these lines.
> However, I also don't think that should stop us from optimizing
> for the common case.

Well, commonly, for a desktop computer, I recommend separated /usr,
/var, /tmp and /home. Reasonably, if you put enough space for it (for
example, 16GB for usr, 8GB for var, 1GB for tmp) then you can set the
rest for /home. Today's HDD are really big, and in most cases, this
setup will work very well for a desktop, and you'll be able to install a
really insane amount of software without filling up /usr or /var. If you
then lack space, LVM is there.

Doing this has many advantage. Like, if your laptop has to unexpectedly
reboot (like when you inadvertently removed power cord when batteries
were not plugged, which happens often in real life), having separated
partitions usually makes the fsck faster. Only some of the partitions
may have dirty bits to clean, and there's a very good chance your /usr
(which holds a lot of files and is long to check) doesn't even need a
check. That alone is a cool feature that justifies having a separate
/usr for me.

When it comes to *real* newbies (here, I'm thinking about people like my
father in law or my wife who really, don't want to know what is
partitionning), they wont go to hit corner cases and fill any of the
partitions of their HDD anyway. For them, I see no issue "wasting" a bit
of space on multiple hundreds of GB space that will anyway never be used.

> Only in the case where you have such a big disk that you can afford to
> waste a pile of space with mostly empty partitions. Personally [...]

In most general cases nowadays, we *do* have huge disks. Just have a
look into what's available in the marketplace. If you lack space in one
of the default partitions, you can resize using LVM anyway.

Thomas