Re: Resolutions to comments on LSB-FHS-TS_SPEC_V1.0
Hi,
>>"Wichert" == Wichert Akkerman <wakkerma@cs.leidenuniv.nl> writes:
Wichert> Previously Daniel Quinlan wrote:
>> I would like to be more certain that nobody is going to be upset by
>> any changes to the mail spool specification in FHS, so could you tell
>> me your distribution's preference on this?
Wichert> Can we agree our preference is /var/mail, is stated in the
Wichert> current FHS?
I think I would disagree, and not merely as an opinion.
While the new FHS is trying for conformance with other unices,
we should also consider rtadition (traditionally, /var/spool/mail has
been the location for Linux boxes)
I, and a number of other sysadmins, have a partition for /var,
and mount /var/spool on it. The understanding has always been that
*/spool/ directories contain data that may grow unpredictably. If I
use log rotation, and purge old logs regularly, /var remains a more
or less static in size, apart from the spool directories. One has
little control over the size of the spool directories. So, one puts
the spool directory on another partition.
Another factor is wehen the spool directories are used for
USENET or mail, there are a large number of small files with a high
turnover; one some file systems one may tweak parameters to make the
file system better suited for spools. (This is certainly less true
for mail than for news, but still)
I have generally put large partitions for spool, and prefer
not to have an overfull spool partition bring down the system.
I have no objections to a compatibility link in /var/mail, or
to modifying code to look in both places.
So far, I have not seen any rationale for moving to /var/mail
other than ``those other unices do it'', and I think a symlink shall
address all those concerns quite well. I suppose there sould also be
an argument that the mail spool is not really a spool, but a message
queue still qualifies for being on the spool partition. (trying to
move my mail spool directory to /var/mail may well fail on some of my
machines due to file system getting overfull)
I have not being following the FHS list, so these opinions may
well be un informed.
manoj
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Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>
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