[conspire] Partitioning problem

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):

> May I ask why not? After reexamining the Debian Sarge installation
> manual's brief discussion of LVM, it occurs to me that Enzo the Third has
> been the poster child for it.

In my experience, additional levels of indirect device reference become only
really justifiable if you expect to use them.  The main point of LVM is
to be able to seamlessly add and remove physical volumes to shrink or
expand disk space, and frankly I have absolutely no need of that.  
(If I find over time that I've misjudged a partition's size, I go to
single-user mode[1], move some files off-system, make new partitions, move
the files back, go back to multiuser.  Total elapsed time:  30 minutes,
tops.  Usually less -- and some trees can be moved without going
single-user, for that matter.)

Absent specific advantages, all you get out of it is a more-complex
system, and really I don't want that.

Partly this was instinct and gut feeling; partly, it's the lessons
earned from applications of similar notions in slightly different
contexts.  E.g., Red Hat's LABEL= mechanism for partitions (similar in
that it's an additional level of indirect reference for filesystems)
causes all kinds of grief.  Man, you have no idea how puzzling it is
trying to figure out why a RHEL system will no longer boot, when all you
did was add an additional hard drive.  Five hours later, you notice that
you now have two LABEL=ROOT filesystems.  Grrr....

[1] Of, if necessary, booting from maintenance media.