This is an excellent discussion. In my view, the main issue is not whether users need this repartitioning but whether applications which people develop need it. There may only be small percentage of users who want a large, posix-compatible, never-unmounted, filesystem but there may be some applications those user's want to use which have those requirements (primarily games, probably).

Can we get some agreement on the requirements of the new architecture, before deciding the best way to achieve them?

I agree with Fanoush that we need the system to be able to have part of the MMC which it owns and which can be over-written during upgrades. This could be mounted as /home (or, maybe, something like /home/system).

For those of us who need to be able to boot different software releases, for testing, we would want to have different /home's available, which we arrange to be mounted correctly for the image we are booting (a task for the bootmenu).

There should be a user area (/home/user) which should be common, preserved and not touched by upgrades/reflashes. This area should always be mounted (not unmounted during USB access) and should be a Posix filesystem.

There should also be an area which is exported as a VFAT filesystem over USB for easy transfer of files to/from the device from/to Windows systems. This could be /home/user/MyDocs (although it might be better to have it more explicitly labelled as something like /home/user/My Exported Folder).

The hardest part of the requirement is to work out how the space should be divided up between these three areas. Ideally, of course, they should by dynamic. If anyone can come up with a solution which does that I would be very happy.

Graham