Re: Making a partition larger without affecting my OS.

On 3/17/26 4:22 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Hello, Eli.
> 


>> Nobody mentions the elephant in the room! Why have separate partitions?
> 
> There are good reasons, and I'm not telling you anything new.  ;-)
> 
> I have a separate /boot partition, since this needs to be an ancient MS
> filesystem which I don't want my sole partition to be.


I think it is fairly obvious I was not referring to this.

(Also you *can't* use fat32 for a linux rootfs, because it doesn't
support critical features like symlinks, or file permissions, so either
no files are readable or all of them are even if they are security
sensitive. Also all files must be mounted executable so that some
executables will run.)


> I have a separate /home partition, so that in the event of my system
> breaking, I can use a backup system, still keeping the same /home.


This doesn't affect "build chroots".


> I have a separate /var/db/repos/gentoo partition with lots of inodes, to
> contain lots of small ebuild files.


Most filesystems should not run out of inodes due to such few number of
files (barely 130k). This anyways doesn't affect "build chroots".


>> I have a build chroot too -- it is on the main FS. It works totally fine
>> and can grow larger automatically.
> 
> Yes, that is one of the advantages of having a single partition.  As
> always in GNU/Linux, one has the choice and must make a choice.  Our
> choices are different.


One must also ask what the purpose of a choice is. Usually it is to
accomplish a goal, so what's the goal?

And, sometimes, the purpose of a choice is for no goal at all, merely to
insist on choice for the sake of choice. That's not something to hold up
as a good example.


-- 
Eli Schwartz

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