separate /home by default

[Henry Baldursson]

 Not quite related, but yet somewhat so.

 What about using swap files instead of the more permanent measure of
reserving partition space for swap?

According to Dave Jones' post-halloween document, swap files should be
just as fast as swap partitions in 2.6.x.

 http://zenii.linux.org.uk/~davej/docs/post-halloween-2.6.txt

 Just a thought. Since it gives the user more freedom in future
configurations, such as that just because he has 1gb ram doesn't mean
he'll need 2gb of swap "just because the old linux installation manual
I read said swap=ram*2".

 Also, tmpfs for /tmp is a valid consideration. Many times I have had
some integral component of Gnome crash after a apt-get dist-upgrade in
Hoary, and then rebooted and found that all my menubar items were
missing along with my icons and stuff, so I was left with two bars
with a show desktop button on there and nothing else, and had to
remove some dot directories from /tmp to clear the mess up. Plus tmpfs
should be faster than disk access.

 My reason for this preference is that I opted for a fast harddrive
for /, got the WDC Raptor which has 10000rpms and 5.2ms seek times,
but only 37giga of space.

 I guess I fall into the "idiot" slot cause I want single partitions
for my disks and just more disks. Oh and in case you're wondering, no
I don't have a /boot partition.

On Tue Feb 1 01:27:14 CST 2005 Matt Zimmerman wrote:
>On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 02:16:36AM -0500, John Richard Moser wrote:
>
>> Shouldn't /home be separate from / by default?
>
>We had this discussion before the Warty release, and the consensus was
>basically "no".  Proper partitioning requires too much information from the
>user, who shouldn't even be required to think about it.
>
>Alternate partitioning options are available in the expert installation mode
>for those who want them, but for the default, KISS applies.  Consider that a
>common use case for a partitioning scheme is "never even think about it".