Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs is fine
On Sun, 27 May 2012, Iustin Pop <iustin@debian.org> wrote:
> There's a difference between "tmpfs is bad" and "the defaults for tmpfs
> are bad".
The new defaults don't seem good when they are suddenly applied on upgrade.
My workstation unexpectedly went from having 2G of free space on the root
filesystem for /tmp to 600M of tmpfs. 600M is almost filled by two TED talks
so with my habits of downloading multiple video files that was never going to
work.
I think it would be a great feature to have the Debian installer give an
option of a tmpfs for /tmp. I think it would be quite OK to have it default
to tmpfs on /tmp but give the user the option of doing otherwise. But having
it just default to tmpfs and change existing systems on upgrade doesn't seem
that good.
This discussion has demonstrated that there are more than a few good reasons
to support both using tmpfs and not using tmpfs for /tmp. But I can't think
of any good reason for changing a working system, all of my systems running
Squeeze which should have a tmpfs on /tmp (IMHO - and I'm really the one who
knows) already have it. There is no need for a change when I upgrade.
Sure it's easy for me to fix that when upgrading and when compared to all the
other things I have to do on an upgrade it's not much of a big deal. But it
would still be good to not be surprised.
For installing new systems I don't think it matters much what the default is,
whatever is chosen will be good for some, bad for others, and probably not
matter to most people. But making it easy to change is a good thing.
--
My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
Reply to: