how do people play with different versions of DBSD on the same system?

[Bill Hacker]

Bob Bagwill wrote:

How are people playing with different versions of DBSD on the same system?
Do you install them on separate disks? Separate slices? Separate 
partitions?
If you want to avoid having separate /etc's, /var's, and /home's, what's 
the most elegant
way to do it?
The most 'elegant' way is to NOT AVOID having separate ones.... They 
need to be allowed to differ!

- partition and slice your media into many (preferably equal sized) 
portions.

- install an appropriate boot manager.

- install each new entire system into a single slice, with the whole fs 
on the same slice, directly under '/'

- IOW, label only one swap, same one each time - and one '/' mountpoint, 
different one each time.

- On each install, do not touch any of the other slices, and do not let 
/etc/fstab mount them, either.

- use the BM to change 'personality'

- manually mount/umount the 'foreign' slices only if/as/when you need to 
move data between and among them - including 'cloning' an entire slice 
to another.

Far safer than sharing /home, /usr, /var /etc /<whatever> and trying to 
remember what matches <whatever>

A separate partition or HDD can be mounted as a common storage / 
applications area, but should not have any OS-related files or needed 
resources on it.

HTH,

Bill Hacker