Re: ODP: Resolutions to comments on LSB-FHS-TS_SPEC_V1.0

[Husain Al-Mohssen <mohsseha@aramco.com.sa>]

I think that this is a good idea (IMHO as u would guess :) . I think that for far too long we have been chopping up our disks for this reason and losing alot of flexibility (and money if not sleep) because of this. I think that Linux needs new ideas in it or it would be just another very good unix but only that. OTOH I don't think I would be able to do it myself :-/

Husain

Rafal Pietrak wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I know that it's a bit out-off-the-line (that is, the "solution" I'll propose), I don't have anything to add the current "*/mail* discussion, but please don't flame me, the "solution" is just an idea that may be somebody from the current discussion audience could take if one likes it.
>
> The subject: It looks to me, that everybody cares about mail spool disk usage, so a lot of people put mail spools on a separate partition. In doing so, some people like to have partitions mounted as close to root as possible (the /var/mail variant). IMHO the choice is really quite unimportant, we live with symlinks for quite some time now, and they really serve the purpose of allowing both distributors and admins not to care too much. There is also an issue of  best backup schedules that are different for *spool/mail and for *spool/lpd (for example) that make people have spool/mail on a separate partition from spool/other; but this doesn't support my points in the following paragraph, so I leave it alone for now.
>
> The actual problem is disk usage management limitation that we have on Unix boxes. Independently of whatever conclusion this FHS discussion on */mail comes to; Probably, it would be quite nice if some kernel guru took a deep breath and think of a "subdirectory tree" based quotas as an addition to current "UID based" filesystem quotas and "partition size" limitations, that today's Unixes provide for disk space management.
>
> I think, that if such "quotas" existed - thus allowing to provide a quota of, say 40MB, within /var/spool/mail for GID=mail and nobody else; and, say 10MB, within /var/spool/lpd to UID=lpd and, say 15MB, within /var/spool/cron to UID=root -- current /var/spool/mail discussion would be much less fierce or even void. For a time, everybody would live with couple of compatibility symlinks around, and since there would be no reason to move any */spool/* around, even those symlinks would disappear soon... I think.
>
> -R
>
> ----------
> Od:  Alan Cox[SMTP:alan@cymru.net]
> Wys³any:  26 stycznia 1999 01:16
> Do:  Theodore Y. Ts'o
> DW:  quinlan@transmeta.com; alan@cymru.net; gordon.m.tetlow@vanderbilt.edu; florian@suse.de; hpa@transmeta.com; ewt@redhat.com; fhs-discuss@ucsd.edu; ajosey@rdg.opengroup.org; lsb-test@linuxbase.org; lsb-spec@linuxbase.org; lsb-spec@lists.linuxbase.org; debian-devel@lists.debian.org
> Temat:  Re: Resolutions to comments on LSB-FHS-TS_SPEC_V1.0
>
> One simple one - I want my mail on the spool disk. Its in the grows
> randomly, mostly crap, doesnt cause hassle if it fills for a while
> category