Comment # 33 on bug 1093372 from Richard Brown

Code fixed, tests passing, closing this even though it hasn't been fully merged
yet (looks like it's blocked by yast2 lan in staging M)

to answer some of the concerns

> 1. Will /home get formatted on a fresh installation?

Yes, just as /var does, or /opt, or /usr/local, and /etc, and all the other
locations on the filesystem which does have user-supplied information.
We've never optimised for 'reinstallation'. We have perfectly good in place
upgrade options, and any user doing an installation should always, always
backup all of the above locations and any other which include data they might
want post-installation.

That said, it's a simple tick box in the guided installer to have a separate
/home partition for those that prefer the old behaviour.

> 2. Do we have a reasonable GUI to remove less important snapshots in out-of-disk situation? I mean something that would show what is archived by which snapshot and how much space each snapshot blocks.

YaST2 snapper does all of the above besides "how much space each snapshot
blocks", because the nature of CoW prevents it. Think of it this way: deleting
one snapshot that currently blocks a lot of space, doesn't necessarily reclaim
all that space, because when other (previously smaller, as CoW snapshots only
retain diffs) snapshot now references all the data previously 'owned' by the
old 'larger' snapshot.

We have advanced built-in, automatic, deletion of snapshots based space in use.
It needs a certain amount of space for the process to work properly and
reliably. With these new defaults I expect the topic of snapshot space in use
will be far less of a concern to far fewer people.