Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs is fine

[Salvo Tomaselli <tiposchi@tiscali.it>]

> Doing that on inferior hardware is just plain stupid. If you have
> plenty of
> disk space, just unpack the tar archive.
Double-click on a .tar causes it to be unpacked in /tmp/something.
I suppose a lot of not so skilled users do that instead of tar -xf

> And those with lots of RAM but not so much disk space (SD card or USB
> driver or
> even with no hard drive at all)? 
Can you link me one such device? Nothing pops in my mind. And how widespread 
they are?
Normal desktop/laptop configurations have at least 100 times more disk space 
than ram.
For servers.. it depends on the taks they are supposed to do, but usually 
servers have an administrator who is more or less aware of what he is doing.

> There's no solution that works for everyone in all situations. 
True.
But experts can change the defaults more effectively than non experts.

> However, tmpfs at least works for many of them. If you KNOW
> that this default does not fit your use-case, why don't you simply
> change the configuration?
The point is that the desktop user is often clueless and doesn't know it. He 
will just notice the problem and will not have a clue of how to solve it.

So I would suggest that defaulting to a more safe configuration would be 
better, and of course those who want tmpfs can always change the default. But 
those who don't even know about what /tmp is would not end up with something 
that doesn't work so well on their hardware.

Bye

-- 
Salvo Tomaselli