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.
--Mike