decisions coming up

[Mikus Grinbergs]

> * should we use an overlay for /home?  how big?

I have no idea how overlays work.  My suggestion would be to somehow 
preserve /home, such that when a new rawhide .img (i.e., build) gets 
installed, the previous content of /home is not affected.  [For 
instance, if the user has put a symbolic link into some directory in 
/home -- that link is still there even when the content of '/' gets 
changed by the process of installing the new rawhide version.]

How big ?  The answer depends upon where/how Activities are placed.
If I can figure out how to do it, I would put all my Activities on 
my SD card (*not* affected by rawhide .img installs), and only have 
symbolic links in /home to where the activity stuff actually 
resides.  [That is, /home could be 10MB or so.]  In the current 
rawhide-xo builds, activity stuff is in /usr/share/sugar (i.e., it 
*is* affected by rawhide .img installs).  If this situation 
continues, again only symbolic links need to be in /home, which can 
be quite small.  But if Activities themselves were to be placed in 
/home, then one might have to set aside some 500MB to hold them.


> * should we partition the NAND and swap to it?

I'm a great believer in swap files.  [On my "production" XO (on 
which I've run 100%-CPU-using background computations) I have an 
external hard disk with the XO's swap file on it.]  But I don't see 
any reason for the very people who _supply_ the XO to be the ones to 
supply software which wears out the NAND.  My recommendation is to 
document/make_easy for people to add cheap non-built-in storage to 
function as a swap file.  [I'm particularly thinking of an SD card 
being used for the XO's swap file.]


> * maybe, at least for NAND, we should be using an installed image rather
>   than a live image?

Speaking for myself, I have no interest in "preserving" one system 
on NAND while "plugging in" a second ("live") system via some other 
device.  [I 'copy-nand' the rawhide-xo .img into NAND, and only then 
run it.]  I have gone out of my way to purchase several XOs, so I 
can afford to have two XOs for 8.2.1, one XO for rawhide, etc.


> * should the bootable.gz include a swap partition?

Could somebody please tell me how the bootable.gz gets used ?
Does it get loaded into a running workstation, so as to set up a 
"virtual system" for the purpose of doing testing of rawhide ?


Thanks,  mikus