Talk:Arch Btrfs Setup Guide

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Latest comment: 24 November 2017 by Caddar in topic Arch BTRFS installation

Arch BTRFS installation

I'd like to discuss the need and/or other possibilities for an Arch setup with BTRFS/Snapper, as I'm not happy with the way this was handled by Lahwaacz.

As a summary beforehand it would be possible to update the existing articles to also show a different approach (namely the one taken by openSuse), but I have the feeling it is much more obtrusive to edit and change this without properly discussing and it seems much easier to create a new page with the information and then discuss if this would fit into the existing articles. In the "normal" wikipedia this would be a "user page", but I could not find anything related in the Arch Wiki. Just deleting this and redirecting to another page without any discussion seems inappropriate and even a bit rude.

Now, back to the facts: I'm using arch for 6 years (no noob..) and recently installed a new laptop, trying BTRFS. While (as usual) the wiki pages are very informative, the parts related to BTRFS and Snapper, especially together with the partition/subvolume layout are not undisputable. Most of it seems based on this forum thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1722289 from 2015, which already has some discussions about the described techniques (see e.g. #24).

openSuse as distribution with default BTRFS has a different (and more complex) scheme working very well together with Snapper (which is also created by openSuse maintainers). Details can be found here: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.advdisk.html . This scheme also has the advantage of being better documented, better tested and having more resources available on the internet. But manually setting up Arch (or any other distro) with this scheme is difficult and needs some adjustments to the naive btrfs root/home scheme.

I can clearly see value in the openSuse-style BTRFS being documented for anyone doing a non-Suse-installer BTRFS setup, but I could be wrong. Now, if the Arch Wiki has some way to create a "draft" page to discuss this, I can do this. But I did not find anything in https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ArchWiki:Contributing . If there is a better way to discuss if a page should be created or not, please add this to the Contributing-page. Just removing and redirecting is annoying and kills all motivation to contribute something useful, and if I had not profited so much from the arch wiki over the past years I would not had the motivation to write this lengthy discussion page and just dumped it..

Caddar (talk) 09:25, 24 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I don't see the point in adding yet another installation guide simply because of a chosen combination of file system and backup tool. In any event, ArchWiki does have a "draft" mechanism in the form of user pages (for example User:Caddar/Snapper), so it's better to finish something there first before publishing it to the main namespace. -- Alad (talk) 10:15, 24 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Thank you for the answer - I can see your point and as I said it might be possible to integrate this as another "view" in the existing pages (as they already include some very specific "installation guides"). Anyway, I apologize for not using the existing the user page feature. Would it be possible to highlight the existing paragraph on ArchWiki:Contributing so this info is easier to find? For an example: User:Caddar/Contributing ). Caddar (talk) 10:50, 24 November 2017 (UTC)Reply[reply]