[Mageia-dev] time to switch from raw partitions to lvm?

[Buchan Milne]

----- "Thorsten van Lil" <tvl83 at gmx.de> wrote:

> Am 22.02.2011 09:07, schrieb Buchan Milne:
> 
> > The user will still *always* be able to decide what he wants. The
> question is, what to do for users who don't know what to decide. IMHO,
> for a first time user, it is *much* better to give them a "Use
> available space, with growable filesystems" or similar, than a
> statically partitioned, based on difficult-to-get-right heuristics.
> >
> 
> That's a good point. The step for partitioning is still the most
> complex 
> one during the installation. There are really often questions and 
> discussions how to partition the hard disk.

Exactly. Dispensing with this requirement would make installation much easier, and still put the user in a position where they aren't setup for failure (all other solutions do, IMHO).

> But, as a user who doesn't know anything about LVM, we should only 
> switch if the algorithm for LVM works really really stable and is easy

With static partitions, the heuristics have to be good. For LVM, they just have to:
-Ensure enough space for installation to succeed
-Ensure a large percentage of the VG is not allocated (as growing is easier than shrinking)

> to use.
> It seems to me positive to switch to LVM for default but it's not
> really 
> important,

You obviously haven't seen how many users have questions about shrinking / from 50GB because they need more space for /home, or similar questions, on IRC.

> so we don't should risk to much and take the time it needs,
> 
> instead of forcing it to be finished for the next release, for
> example.

I listed the issues that I believe block switching to LVM by default. If they are fixed, I would think it would be an idea to launch the first stable release with LVM by default.

Regards,
Buchan