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



On Fri, 16 Dec 2011 at 12:13:55 +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> As for /var that should be a seperate partition. [...]
> Overall it is a good idea and having it a
> seperate partition is no burden for the normal user.

I don't think that should be the default; remember that the default is what
will be chosen by users who don't (want/need to) understand the reasons why
one partitioning scheme is better than another.

I'm sure having more than one partition is great on serious machines with
a sysadmin, but whenever you have more than one partition, you run the risk
of mis-estimating the space requirements for those partitions and, for
instance, running out of space for /home while / still has plenty of space
(or vice versa). If you have, or are, a sysadmin, great, you can set up
symlink farms or resize LVs or something; but if you don't understand
that sort of thing, you're left with "I've run out of space, but simultaneously
have plenty of space... this is strange and I don't know how to fix it".

I'm certainly not going to talk my parents through how to boot recovery
media and resize their filesystems over the phone, so they're better off
with one big partition. If they run out of space, they run out of space,
and at least that's a user-comprehensible failure mode. ("You have too
much stuff. Solution: have less stuff.")

I used to have a separate /, /usr and /home on my own machines, but I've
given up on that; in practice I never got the size estimates right (e.g.
"/usr was large enough, but then I wanted to try vegastrike", and life's too
short to spend time booting in single-user mode and resizing LVs. 

Similarly, I used to have a partially-encrypted filesystem (unencrypted /usr)
on my laptop, but now I just encrypt the whole root filesystem - it's easier
and at least as safe. I switched to whole-disk encryption at the same time
I switched to a new laptop, so the faster CPU more than made up for the extra
crypto, and I didn't notice a performance penalty.

    S


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