On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 10:46 (-0700), Mike Bird via tde-users wrote:
On Wed September 23 2026 10:06:43 Jim via tde-users wrote:
just out of curiosity... why would you want to rebuild all that stuff (build system, git, ...)? Is it all on the same partition as the OS, and gets wiped when you wipe the OS partition?
If it is all on that partition, would it not be judicious (in the future) to have a partition just for the distro files, and another one for all these other things?
Hi Jim,
My main server has 12 mounts, most of them resizable logical volumes, in order to keep stuff separate as much as possible. One of my other servers has 53 mounts.
But packages and customization intersect where configuration happens, and that's mostly in /etc, plus a few places in /var.
Pretty much the whole of /etc - 25MB on my main server - is a mix of virgin stuff from packages and customization. That all needs careful attention when wiping and reinstalling and restoring from backup. If you try to restore /etc as a whole you'll break things because e.g. partition UUIDs and ssh host keys will have changed. In the event of a crash you'll probably try to keep the old broken server around while building the replacement, so IP addresses and hostnames will change too. You can't just restore /etc.
And some things like mailman3 mailing lists are even worse - the configuration is held in databases that TTBOMK aren't even properly documented.
Hi Mike,
it is indeed a nuisance having to re-do all the /etc configs when installing a new distro. I've been using Linux since 1997 or so and have been to this rodeo too many times. At some point I decided to take more scrupulous notes about what I configured, so that for a new distro version, or disaster recovery, I would have a good idea of what needs to be done.
These days I have a number of partitions for different distros (or versions thereof) and when I upgrade, I never (ever!) wipe my old distro until I'm happy that the new one is working well. And even then I usually leave it there until I am installing a newer version of the distro (or another distro, should I do that) and need that partition.
Of course, all these root partitions eat up a certain amount of "disk" space.
I was surprised that some of the things you mentioned had configs in /etc. But if they do, I can appreciate the magnitude of the problem.
Cheers. Jim