On 09/14, Tobias Hunger wrote:
Factory reset is great, especially for a distro involving a lot of manual tweaking like arch:-) With factory reset you always know how to undo your own changes, getting back to the default state. That works for either all changes ever done to the system (factory reset) or selectively by just removing the configuration files you tweaked last.
Frankly, with the existence of LVM and BTRFS snapshots, revision control systems and incremental backups, I can't for the life of me understand what use the overwhelming majority of Archers would have for a "factory reset" feature. The only people I've ever known to use a factory reset feature are Windows users who couldn't be bothered to make backups. Besides, maybe I'm missing something here, but since Arch uses upstream settings as its defaults in almost every case, "factory reset" provides the exact same functionality as reinstalling from scratch. There's really no sense in the Arch devs and all Arch users go through the trouble, from what I can see. You're asking everyone who uses Arch to make significant changes (to more than just the pacman db) to accomodate corner cases. -- "A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams