Bug#935931: Re: Bug#935931: debian-installer: Reinstalling Debian on a current Debian installation without erasing or fomatting the home folder

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 12:51:33PM -0400, Daniel wrote:
> Dear Lennart,
> 
> I hope that when one opens a "whishlist bug" at least there is a chance to
> have a confrontation.
> 
> The main point I want to address is when you do a "smart installation" it is
> supposed to perform a clean installation hence the only folder that must to
> be untouched is "/home". The same concept when you have "/" and "/home" in
> separated partitions and you perform a clean installation. I think that is
> pretty trivial, the smart parts are:
> 
> * the installer is able to check for a previous Debian installation before
> to begin the process;
> 
> * and in case it founds a previous installation, the installer, is able to
> perform a fresh installation without overwriting the "/home" folder.

Well I believe you have the option to not format a mountpoint during
the install already, so at least that part should be pretty easy.

> I can confirm that ElementaryOS and POP!_OS, that share the same installer,
> can do that.

Well hopefully someone will try to contribute that then.  I suspect the
main thing is finding someone that wants to implement it and do the work
to add it and maintain it.

> Last point I want touch is about the swap partition. With the SSD and the OS
> able to boot in a bunch of seconds the hibernation doesn't make any sense
> today. For example I have 16GB of ram, based on the standard rules I should
> use at least 1.5x of the ram if not the double. It means that I should use
> 32GB just to hibernate my session, no way... With the SSD disks the lesser
> you write on the disk the better, I put just 2GB of swap-file and
> "swappiness" at 1 and the swap is never used and I didn't waste 30GB of
> space.

Only advantage to huibernation is not having to close all the things
you are working on and opening them again after the next boot.  I do
find hibernation takes too long with a lot of ram and hence never do it
myself. :)

> To conclude I think I elaborated everything clearly, I see a lot of benefits
> and improvement with the suggestions I gave to Debian, I also think that are
> pretty trivial to implement. I don't want introduce a Windows behavior of
> "reinstall when it broken", but back to time when I hadn't a fast internet
> connection it was faster download the full ISO and performing a fresh
> installation rather than doing a "dist-upgrade".

I remember upgrades over dial up.  Still did not make me want to go
download full iso images elsewhere.  It could do it while I slept.
Things have gotten a lot bigger since then though.  I have seen people
keep a subset mirror of Debian on a USB drive that they would update with
rsync once in a while at work, and bring home to use for upgrades where
the connection was slow.  Still in place upgrades of course, not using
the installer.

> The bottom line is with a smart installer you don't need to separate your
> disk(s) in partitions but you can throw everything in "/" including the
> "swap" as swap-file that you can modify freely based on your needs (if you
> can't live without hibernation[1]). There is also a dynamic swap manager
> available on Debian as well: https://github.com/Tookmund/Swapspace

-- 
Len Sorensen