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

[Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net>]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 07:08:17PM +0000, The Fungi wrote:
> On 2011-12-21 10:42:56 -0800 (-0800), Josh Triplett wrote:
> > People expect that they can use all the capacity of their disk
> > without having to take unusual steps like resizing partitions and
> > filesystems. After installing Debian on a 1TB drive, "df -h"
> > should say that you have just under 1TB of free space, not just a
> > handful of GB.
> [...]
> 
> Which is why I suggested that half the challenge with shifting that
> paradigm is education, to reset those expectations among the user
> base. I didn't mean to imply it would be easily accomplished...
> after all, there's an entire computing lifetime of momentum behind
> us which set the original expectation of all your disk being
> formatted ahead of time.

And things may change yet again in the future.  With Btrfs, one can
have a single filesystem with multiple subvolumes.  The subvolumes
can be mounted independently, and also snapshotted independently,
but have a common pool for free data, so unlike partitions any
subvolume can grow/shrink as required.  I understand that limits
will also be able to be set for subvolumes in the future.  This
gives the ability to have multiple "partitions", but without the
limitations and inflexibility of real partitions, or even logical
volumes.

With Btrfs, it would make logical sense to have dpkg-managed locations
under a single subvolume (two if including /var), which would enable
~instantaneous checkpointing/rollback during upgrades.  User data in
a separate subvolume would thus never be rolled back.  I've not checked
it recently, but support for subvolumes in the d-i partitioner would be
a nice feature for wheezy.


Regards,
Roger

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