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On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Chris Lumens wrote:
I like the idea of creating a /home by default, but I'm not a fan of the 50GB
number. I understand it's slightly over the current Everything install, which
makes sense, but I think about my systems:
1) Over time, your /home directory will probably contain more data than / what
with music, movies, pictures, code, saved email with eBay outbid notices,
0-day warez, video game emulators, and other things. My home directory is
27GB and / is only taking up 5.5GB.
2) /home is also a good place for people to tar up /etc, /root, and other
things if they want to do a fresh install of Fedora. At least I always use it
for that when I do a fresh Fedora install.
3) WWSD[1] and WWFD[2] tell us that / should be minimal and most available
space should go to either /export/home or /usr/home (maybe it's just /home now
on FreeBSD).
Well, there were a couple of reasons why I wanted to go with these
numbers:
(1) Accomodate the crazy Everything install people now.
That is a good point. Better to handle everything in Fedora rather than only
a subset (even though the subset is what the majority of users will ever have
installed).
(2) Provide enough room to store packages when doing yum upgrade or
preupgrade.
Also a good point.
(3) Make it big enough so we don't have to worry about bumping the size
up every release as the distribution gets bigger.
We can say that now, but we'll still have to keep an eye on this number just
like we have to keep an eye on the size for /boot.
(4) We're not recommending a separate /opt, /usr/local, /var, or /tmp
right now so we need enough space for all the things people could do
with those filesystems.
True.
I'm also thinking of what people would be expecting during an install. If I
have a 250GB disk and 50GB is allocated to / by default, I'm going to change
that. I still want a 10GB / and the rest for /home. What are other people's
thoughts on this?
I'm in favor of a /home by default, but I'd like to see the / value lowered
from 50GB.
The way I see it, things are moving in two different directions right
now: disks are getting smaller (netbooks, etc.) and disks are getting
larger (everyone else). For the smaller case, we don't need to worry
about this because we're throwing out the /home case there. For larger,
disks are really giant these days. If we're suggesting 50 GB for / and
that leaves 500 GB for /home, I don't think most people are going to
care about what space they might be losing there.
I really don't think it's g oing to be an issue, but keep in mind that
these are just recommendations and the user always has the option to
change things in the partitioning UI. We don't need to be perfect -
just good enough.
Having said that, I'm not completely tied to this 50 GB number. I did
just kind of pull it out of thin air.
For the standard hard disk size we see now, 50GB is nothing. Netbooks present
a different use case. Are those users interested in a separate /home by
default? Should we care?
I'll agree that 50GB is fine for the normal sized hard disk use case, but
maybe we should break this in to a few different cases:
- The regular hard disk, which for the sake of argument is 250GB
or larger by default.
- The netbook user or someone with 8GB to 64GB of storage available.
- The live CD user, where we already know what will go to / before
we get to partitioning setup.
At least the first and last ones there seem like ones worth tackling. The
netbook use case may be harder to define. Netbooks now have hard disks as
well as SSD. We have a netbook here with a 250GB hard disk in it and my
Thinkpad from RH has a 64GB SSD in it. Go figure.
1) For live installs, we know the size of what's going to /, so we could use
that as the basis for sizing /, then make /boot, swap, and /home.
True, we could be smarter here. That would have to involve setting this
default partition in the backend and might be a little difficult.
However, it could be a decent refinement.
Given how hard the live install concept is sold, I think it would be worth our
time to do something for this use case.
2) x86 may have a smaller / requirement than x86_64, should that be
considered?
Eh, I don't know that it's too important. But it would be easy enough
to take into account with the Platform module.
On second thought, this is probably a waste of time. I don't know what the
size differences are between an everything x86 and everything x86_64 install.
Maybe it's not that great.
3) Let's say "f the FHS" and change /home to /users.
Only if we can call it /Users.
Not "/Documents and Settings"?
- --
David Cantrell <dcantrell@xxxxxxxxxx>
Red Hat / Honolulu, HI
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