On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 13:08 -0600, Jeffrey Stolte wrote: > (I should mention that one of our main uses of FAI is to upgrade > machines from one Debian release to the next. However, rather than do > an in-place upgrade, we do a fresh install of the new release while > preserving the existing partition sizes on the disk.) > > I hope this makes some sense. If no one else has asked for this > capability, though, maybe we need to reconsider our practice of > preserving partition sizes. I don't want you to have to add an option > that no one else uses or that is not considered to be a "best practice". > Let me know if you need any additional information. Thanks.
I would cast another vote towards adding such an option. Our use case is the following: we have several dual-booting laptops where the Windows partition(s), as well as the master boot record (which may contain manufacturer-specific code to access recovery partitions, etc) should be touched as little as possible. Just as the above user, we prefer fresh installs to in-place upgrades. It would feel very reassuring if there were an option in FAI which essentially meant "do not touch anything in disk paritioning, just create new filesystems on existing partitions where requested, and leave all the rest unchanged". In today's situation, I always feel an urge to test my setups (based on hooks and/or manual intervention) several times on a "disposable" test machine before I dare to run FAI on a "real" system. Toomas Tamm
