I changed the subject, because the points I will mention down, are more about the policies openSUSE follows. Who finally decides how openSUSE should look like and where is the discussion of this going on? jdd schrieb:
I think there is a misunderstanding of what is your home.
In fact there two very different parts.
* your own work, datas, documents. This should be on an other parttion. Many advantages, very easy backups, for examples.
* the config data of apps (all the "." files)
This last part can be very different from an install to an other.
This is a very important point. And it was a dark moment in Unix history, when somebody decided, that user configuration should go into dot-files in the user's home directory. I don't know, if openSUSE is the correct location to change this. Is there any discussion about this on FSH or LSB? To add some other points. A wise reason for using partitions is, if you can keep some of them read-only. IMHO, also configuration partitions should be read-only and only changed to rw during the moment of an admin writing changes to it. So /etc/mtab (mtab really should be in /var) is an obstacle of achieving this for /etc, there might be others. Another dumbness is the kde method of storing configuration data under /usr (or /opt, wherever kde is installed). The next topic in a partition discussion is backup strategy. For example /usr would be very nice to be kept read-only for security reasons, but from a backup point-of-view it's not interesting as everything there can be restored from your installation media. The only relevant data is your software choice, which you can then use again during installation time. AFAIK this important piece of information by default is never stored! And as a last resort, there is software not installed by the OS itself (e.g. all the small scripts you use for daily work, but also 3rd party software not supported by the OS). So with regard to these points in the future we should have a lot of partitions linked in place (or all software changed to this new FSH standard ;-) ), the problem is their size. Is there any file system which allows on-the-fly resizing (both increasing and shrinking)? This would be my favourite solution: to have different partitions, which can be resized on-demand to avoid the size troubles. I don't know of any, so maybe the SUSE people should use their contacts to the reiserfs people or the other kernel-filesystem-guys to support full ability to resize on-the-fly. As a short term solution maybe the upgrade way could have an option "delete everything but: [ ]/home, [ ]/etc, [ ]..." instead of "format /". Then the situation of not having separate /home is easier to handle, and it's up to the user who wants to keep his files to handle the possible changes of configuration methods. Offering an option "Backup: [ ]/home, [ ]/etc, [ ]..." would also be a possibility. In more general terms we should think about "pieces worth to be kept during upgrades" and if we want to keep them therefore on a separate partition or if we should backup them by default.
To access your data, last SuSE creates /dataX folders with others partition, so they are easily mounted. it's then enough to link your valuable data to any home folder.
I like this concept it should really be expanded with regard to my other points.
for now the only problem (minor) I have had is thunderbird don't accepting links, so I was obliged to copy the .thunderbird folder
But it allows to link the files inside the folders (I do this even for Win, Linux and FreeBSD linking to the same folder on a FAT32 partition). Ciao Siegbert