Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

One downside of any attempt to impose how subvolumes are used on peoples systems, is that it will immediately break people who want to use subvols for administering their own systems.

I rely heavily on maintaining various parts of my systems in subvols that are regularly cloned & manipulated in various ways (chroots/containerisation, backups, major upgrades). I believe I am far from unique here.

This relies on me being able to decide what constitutes a subvolume. As soon as a different idea gets imposed on my system (e.g., fragmenting my OS install into multiple subvols) my ability to use subvols to manage my system will be impeded (e.g., I could no longer create a standalone environment just by "btrfs subvol clone"ing my OS).

OTOH a stow (remember that?) like system of isolating packages into their own directories sounds great to me, not least because I can choose to put a package into it's own subvol if I wish.