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Originally Posted by bastler
- we cannot just resize "root" (repartition) because it's on a seperate physical device.
- we cannot get rid of the vfat-partition completely because the camera application (anything else?) can only store data on vfat
- some users might need vfat for MS-Windows compatibility
Is this about correct or did I miss something?
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1) the root partition makes sense as this is what the flasher overwrites
and which gives you a basic working system. home should be the user's playground.
2) the camera app works with a FAT32 image file mounted as loop device.
so we can get rid of the FAT partition completely and replace it by FAT images.
3) same as 2), you can keep a FAT image for M$ compatibility.
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1. When doing the VFAT via the sparse image: does it shrink again once files are removed? Someone mentioned earlier that it wouldn't...
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no. but in theory it should be possible to "sparsify" a ext3 file with
holes defined by the cluster allocation in the FAT image.
virtual machine users would benefit from such a feature as well.
For now we should stick to "dense" images for normal users.
advanced users can use the same tricks as for the virtual machine harddisks.
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2. If it's just the camera, what about having it store data onto the SD? There's already an option for that builtin.
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we cannot force users to buy a SD for taking pictures.
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Dreaming further: I don't use Windows, so with the camera shooting to SD, to hell with the internal vfat partition. Could I instead just get one large ext3-partition containing /home (and /home/MyDocs as a subfolder if I must) and export that to usb?
ext4 would also be interesting, but I'm not sure wether the N900's kernel supports it
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you may have a single ext3/4 partition on the flash but you cannot export it
while it's mounted. you could, however, export it via NFS or export ext3 image files.
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As for installing foreign packages: I don't completely understand yet how this works exactly, but couldn't we just "export" /usr/ to the large flash the same way /opt/ is exported now? Shouldn't that solve the problem and be a lot easier than migrating "root" to a LVM on a live system?
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I don't understand why did not stick to the original UNIX layout.
/usr, /bin etc. are stored on /
and the hierarchy /usr/local is for user installed applications.
/usr/local/bin, lib, share, icons etc. are added to the standard search paths
so that all user apps are found automatically.
The flash could be mounted on /mmc with symlinks
/usr/local -> /mmc/local
/home -> /mmc/home
maybe /etc/local -> /usr/local/etc
additionally, we could have /usr/local/stow for non-debianized stuff.
why all the hassle with bind, /opt, LVM, AUFS?