Dave McGuire said:

>   Yeah, yeah.  The "disk is cheap so who gives a damn" argument is  
>popular, I just don't like it. ;)

And the problem with large, cheap IDE disks is that they have a short life.
I have small SCSI disks that are over ten years old and still working. I've
seen mountains of dead IDE drives that only lasted months.

>   But only some of them were based on limited disk space.  What about  
>FFS optimizations based on access patterns?  What about things like the  
>ability to mount /usr read-only?

Exactly.

>   Well meditation might make me more able to deal with the idea of  
>people thinking that certain things have become "OK", and by extension  
>other issues that come up frequently such as the x86 architecture being  
>"modern" and similar arguments, but I'd rather just try really, really  
>hard to do what I think is the right thing to do.

The x86 architecture is cheap, fast, and junk. Throwaway technology.

>   Not trying to be argumentative here...just voicing an opinion.  A  
>strongly-held one borne from years of experience just like you, but an  
>opinion nonetheless.

I've always used multiple partitions, back to 1980 or so.

One thing I've noticed with people who run Linux is that they tend to
constantly reload. They don't back up. They just install the flavor of
the week until they get bored with it.

Also, Windoze is basically a one partition system.

I can only assume that people don't backup systems, or that they can afford
huge tape libraries with automated software.
-- 
Rick Kelly	rmk@rmkhome.com
		<http://www.rmkhome.com/>
		<http://rkba.rmkhome.com/>