Thank you for the in-depth answer to my question about the /root partition size!
<Jolla> There shouldn’t be anything blocking to increase root partition size for older devices but only for flashable image (no resizing during upgrade).
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<Jolla> For time being maybe we just adjust root partition for the older devices – we’ll comment this more a bit later.
This is really good news to me and I understand it’s not a promise on Jolla’s behalf. With 4.6 being the last release for older devices, it might seem that the “insufficient space for upgrade” issue is moot. However, please take into account the possibility of future community provided upgrades as discussed in the adaption repos topic by nephros.
<Jolla> Let’s start from the problem. We’d like to first understand how people end up running out space.
<Jolla> <...> Of course, also just installing tons of apps.
TL;DR for my case: I had to remove so much functionality that the upgrade was about as painful as a reflash.
Despite uninstalling almost every app from my Xperia X, I still didn’t have enough free storage on /root to upgrade. Some major culprits and several smaller items amounted to 435 MB of wasted space - recovering that would increase free space by 80% and take me over the upgrade threshold. However, I was advised not to touch most of these.
Documented in more detail here:
https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/root-partition-filling-up/
<Jolla> Secondly using alternative Sailfish app stores might cause problems.
Although not your responsibility, I would very much appreciate you taking alternative stores and their apps into full consideration when you decide on storage allocations.
As I’m sure you are aware, these are essential for the SailfishOS experience. Backup, edge swipe, tools for battery, WiFi, cellular and GPS, would all be missing or severely limited if we could only use the Jolla Store. Same goes for weather forecasts, SailfishOS Forum, offline maps and navigation, bug reporting, KDE Connect, and more.
<Jolla> There are two related goals that should be kept in mind:
1) apps should not be installed to the root partition
2) root partition should eventually be readonly
My takeaway from olf’s comment above is that this is complicated, and I’m not really competent to add anything. Having said that, I think a read-only root partition sounds like a security feature and a worthy goal.
<jojomen> RCS seems to be at least the new Standard as Apple jumps on that
I won’t take any credit for the RCS topic. To me, RCS is Revision Control System and I don’t think Apple jumped on that lately 