Bug#935931: Re: Bug#935931: debian-installer: Reinstalling Debian on a current Debian installation without erasing or fomatting the home folder
On Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 11:27:29PM -0400, Daniel wrote:
> 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);
I rarely do that, but I can see why some people want it.
> 2. install everything in / ;
I do tend to prefer that for most setups myself.
> 3. not create a "swap partition" but a swap-file.
My understanding is that suspend to disk works much easier with a swap
partition still, but my information could be out of date on that.
And of course swap smaller than ram makes suspend to disk not possible.
> I also add that:
>
> 4. should deactivate root user by default, which is now considering a best
> practice;
Not sure I agree it is considered best practices. A lot of distributions
do it, but not all. I do prefer root login to work from the console if
I have to fix something.
> 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.
Other distributions (Certainly the case for redhat based stuff in the
past) had to do it since they didn't have a working in place upgrade.
That rather makes it required that the installer can do an upgrade and
detect existing settings. Debian seems to have always aimed for an in
place upgrade that worked, so the installer really only had the purpose
of the initial install. It's one of the things that made me switch to
Debian over 20 years ago. I have never had to do a reinstall of a Debian
system except on a machine that lost the disk and I didn't have a backup
of it (nothing important was kept on that system). I really should
have replaced that other disk in the RAID1 within a reasonable amount
of 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.
Collecting all those settings does not sound like a trivial job, and based
on the normal use case of a Debian install, I sure don't see the value
in it. How do you even decide which settings should be preserved and
which should not? What if one of the settings is what broke your system?
If you screw up the system, go fix it. You will learn something from it.
Blowing away the system and installing it again means you learn nothing,
waste a bunch of time, and will likely do it again in the future. I have
certainly broken my installs over the years and had to fix it, but it has
always been possible. Running unstable and experimental stuff at times
means it sometimes breaks for you and you get to put it back together.
Not a big deal.
--
Len Sorensen
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