Hi Nicholas, thanks for your reply, I really appreciated your constructive approach.I use Debian since 2007 and I did a lot of installation, I personally use a FrankenDebian (testing with pinning toward SID and Experimental) however when I install Debian on other machines I install definitely the current stable available. I have been performing exclusively desktop installations and while I consider the best option separating /home recently I found myself not able to get the right balance between "/", "/home" and "swap". The default "/" assigned is often too small while sometimes I wasted gigabyte never used. The "swap" with the amount of ram available today is always more accessory and with the SSD disk the trend is to reduce its use the most. Eventually I stopped to create a "swap" partition in favor of a "swap-file" (like Raspian e.g.); hence I also stopped to create "/" and "/home" but just "/" and still as LVM; at this point you don't have anymore issue with the space and if you need you can add all the disks you want because it is still a LVM partition.
Now the case I am figuring out is the one you didn't separe "/" and "/home" (however the installer is still creating "swap") but you need to reinstall Debian because you screwed it up for some reason. Now a smart installer before to start everything takes its time to check the disk and discovers that you have, along a crypted disk and a LVM group, also a previous version of Debian hence check the users and it asks you if you want keep all the users, just one, etc... and then it reinstalls the system and recovers the setting from the user(s) you selected, without creating a FrankenDebian but just a fresh and **smart** installation.
This leads in my opinion in creating a further voice for the Debian install: **the desktop installation**; Standard and Advanced are eventually too generic and do not target properly the desktop cases. If the D-I was properly able to read LUKS and LVM during the installation time, and if was also able to perform a smart installation as described in the paragraph above, a Desktop installation should be:
1. Create an encrypted partition by default (LUKS + LVM); 2. install everything in / ; 3. not create a "swap partition" but a swap-file. I also add that:4. should deactivate root user by default, which is now considering a best practice;
5. should deactivate the source repos and asking to activate the "contrib" and "non-free" repos (like in Advanced Mode).
I don't see any complicated tasks to achieve, others Linux distro already started to move in this direction while other *nix operative systems already do that since a long time.
The only issues I see here are the resistance to the changes and the fact that actually the D-I has some issue to recognize the encrypted partitions and if you want reinstall Debian you can't preserve any of the partitions you want because it will consider the encrypted disks as blanks.
Best regards, Daniel On 9/28/19 12:01 AM, Nicholas D Steeves wrote:
Geert Stappers <stappers@stappers.nl> writes:On Fri, Sep 27, 2019 at 05:19:06PM -0400, Daniel wrote:Holger Wansing wrote:The debian-installer supports similar use case via the "separate partition for /home" approach.to reinstall Debian on top of itself without overwriting the home partition.Yes, that is what Holger is telling.I think Daniel is requesting an option that does something like this: find /install-target -maxdepth 1 | grep -v 'home\|lost+found' | xargs rm -rf Maybe this way isn't robust enough, but active mounts shouldn't have their mount points removed, because rm: cannot remove '/install-target/foo': Device or resource busy BTW, Daniel, you can decruft your system with "apt purge --autoremove foo", which also deletes config in /etc and will notify you if any files remain in /var. One of the greatest strengths of Debian is that unlike other operating systems, smooth upgrades between stable versions are taken seriously...gravely seriously...so one never needs to reinstall. The only things that I've seen that have ever required action are packages that needed manual configuration updates in /etc (equally solvable by apt purge), and obsolete/broken configuration in /home/user (not solved if this feature request is implemented). What problem is this feature request intended to solve? FrankenDebian? https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian Cheers, Nicholas P.S. apt install installation-birthday :-)