easy install option to save user disk area.

[T Braun]

One of the major reasons that I moved from Red Hat and Gentoo to Ubuntu is how
easy Ubuntu makes it to upgrade. When a new version of gnome or some other
package comes out it is very easy to pop in the new cd and do a new clean
install. My experience with upgrades is that within a release they are ok, but
it is more error prone going from say 4.10 to 5.04. I have a second disk in my
system that is mounted on /other. Everything that I want to keep goes into other
including /home, work. Installing means wiping out the first disk, doing a clean
install then remounting the second drive.

MY SUGGESTION:

This should be a "standard" option that does not require a second drive. The
easy to use install should automatically set up a users non-volitale partition,
put home in it, store apt-get changes, or synaptic and so on. So if I've
apt-getted something like gcc it should be trivial to recreate my system with
the same additional packages.

BENEFITS

I would not suggest this if I did not think that it would make Ubuntu even more
appealing. Microsoft upgrades are infrequent, painful things. it is a
competetive advantage to be able to constantly get the latest and greatest
system without pain and suffering.

Thanks for listening (or reading).

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

We strongly advise upgrading rather than reinstalling on each new release, and
we'd much rather fix any upgrade problems you're encountering.

[T Braun (tab)]

"we'd much rather fix ..." I can understand that from a development point of view (and I program for a living). But from a desktop user perspective it is more deterministic to be able to reinstall or install a new release. One of the worst aspect of windows is that it gets into some unknown state and the cost of reinstall - bringing things back to a deterministic state- is excruciatingly painful. To frame it another way, the question is one of trust. I cannot trust my windows XP system to be in a clean bugfree, not-infected state. And if something goes wrong, I know people who go out and buy a new computer.

So why not make it an option to 1) set up a user data partition. 2) write all changes to the user data partition (the output of synaptics, apt-get). a script for user and group creation etc. 3) create a mechanism where I can do a new install, then point to my user partition and have all the synaptics pkgs reinstalled.

BTW, I just got an email about this today, so I'm responding now.
Thanks

[T Braun (tab)]

I added a comment.

Colin Watson wrote:
> ** Changed in: partman-auto (Ubuntu)
> Sourcepackagename: debian-installer => partman-auto
> Assignee: Colin Watson => (unassigned)
> Status: Unconfirmed => Confirmed
>
>