Non destructive install is important.

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 07:46:45AM -0700, Ian Soutar wrote:
> The new install of 6.06.1 release insists on formatting the / drive. 
> However all distributions of linux allow you leave it unformatted in 
> case you want to preserve something.
> 
> I believe this is a bug because it forces me to format the drive and 
> restore it from an external drive. Now I can do this and have been force 
> to in the last install.

I made this change in 6.06.1 because 6.06 had a tendency to crash if you
tried to install over an existing / without reformatting. I have no
interest in supporting mutant systems where you don't reformat / before
installing; it is very likely that attempting to do so will result in
subtle latent bugs due to extra random files lying around from the
previous installation that aren't handled by the package manager.

If you want to upgrade an existing installation, then you should use the
normal package management tools to do so, not the installer. Therefore,
the primary use case for installing over an existing system is moving
from some other Linux distribution, and as above that is not supportable
without reformatting /.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]