Re: Confused-New Stable Sarge Dist-Upgrade

["Basajaun" <isilanes@bluebottle.com>]

Luis Finotti wrote:
> Dear Basajaun and all,
>
> Basajaun wrote:
> > [snip]
> >
> > Well, you could try the old link trick. First of all locate the biggest
> > directory(ies) residing in /, e.g.
> >
> > du -sh /*
> >
> > then, move that directory and all of its contents to a bigger
> > partition, where space is not a problem, e.g.
> >
> > cp -R /big_dir /scratch/
> >
> > then create a link in / with the old dir name, and pointing to the new
> > location, e.g.
> >
> > ln -s /scratch/big_dir /big_dir
> >
> > Yes, it is a dirty trick, but will save your day until you repartition
> > properly (say, when reinstalling the whole system).
> >
> > HTH,
> >
> >      Basajaun
>
> That was my first idea when reading the original post.  In fact, I was
> thinking of doing that in a laptop of a friend.  Is there any reason why
> this is a "dirty" trick.  Is there any problem or disavantage in doing
> so?  It seemed to me it would be safer (and easier) than changing
> partitions sizes...
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Luis

In fact I don't consider it to be "dirty", I was just being humble :^)

A problem I could think of is that symlinking makes it more difficult
to track what exactly is in each partition. In my example, supposedly
/scratch/ is a big dir where all the temporal files for the execution
of some programs reside. It gets trashed periodically (these programs
don't always successfully delete their temp files), and it is good
practice to delete its contents once in a while. If I am not careful, I
could end up deleting files that _are_ important, and that shouldn't
really be there.

Another problem is that it defeats the whole purpose of partitioning,
which is making independent compartments, so that if one of them fills
up or gets corrupted, the others don't suffer.

Finally, I am not sure if it affects the I/O speed. I guess it should
be transparent, but I don't know.

So, yes, actually it is a good solution :^)

     Basajaun