Re: File System conversion -- ideas

[John Bradford]

> What this boils down to is, "there may not be enough space".
> Personally I prefer incrementally resizing LVM partitions for conversion 
> anyway, but I'll take a stab at this.

Depending on the filesystem, incrementally resizing LVM paritions
could be a very _bad_ way to do it - continuously re-sizing a
partition will typically encourage poor layout and fragmentation.  It
would be possible to defragment and optimise the partition afterwards,
but that would extend the convertion time even more, especially if it
was done in a way which kept a consistent filesystem throughout, on a
filesystem without much free space.

The way to avoid, or at least minimise the problem of having one
partition filling the disk, is not to fully partition disks to begin
with - that gives you the flexibility to test and use different
partition types, and move data around.  Even without using LVM, it's
easy to move data around if it's on partitions which are each no
bigger than 25% of the disk.

John.