*Move my /home onto the / partition*Well, that's generally seen as a bad move, if you expect to be doing any destructive upgrading/testing of your OS.
I propose to have all my "documents" on a separate (FAT) partition, so they will be unaffected by any destructive upgrade. That leaves the configuration information that is stored in ~/.this_and_that/... How would this stuff be affected by an upgrade?
Some people regard their application configuration settings (all those pesky . files) as their documents :-) or at least just as important as them. So it would be inconvenient to lose them - like ssh keys, thunderbird account settings and so on.
I doubt that things like this could be stored on a FAT filesystem, due to the limitations on permissions and so on, but you could surprise me :-)
As far as upgrades go, if you're sticking with your current OS and upgrading, there should never be anything destructive done. But if you wanted to install a Mandrake over the top of a Debian, say (no, I know that no-one would actually *do* such a thing :-) but stick with me here!) the "best" method is to let the installer reformat the root partition and then copy files in. Under these circumstances, you'd loose your $HOME. And with that you'd lose your email cache and account settings, preferences for the desktop settings, and so on ...
-jim
