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

[Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.csiro.au>]

Alan Cox writes:
> > 2. Disk space management.
> 
> We've proved between us that both views are held here. This therefore is a
> rather spurious claim. A (maybe) symlink called /var/spool/mail that points 
> somewhere arbitary is all that is needed for this issue. The FHS need
> say nothing else

I have to agree with Alan on this. Disc space management is a sysadmin
issue. Anyone who cares about protecting the mail spool from overfill
*from other spools* (like the printer) is going to have to deal with
is issue properly. That means putting /var/mail on a separate FS from
/var/spool. As soon as you do that, I can't see any advantage to
mandating /var/mail instead of /var/spool/mail. If you have a separate
FS for mail, the choice boils down to a fer characters in /etc/fstab.

Given that the default RedHat install dumps everything in one FS
under / I don't see any practical benefit (from the disc space
management point of view) of /var/mail over /var/spool/mail. Anyone
who wishes to set up their system sanely is going to put /var and /tmp
elsewhere anyway, so at that point they can decide whether they want
another FS for mail.

On big networks like the one we have here, it matters not, because the
mail spool is on a central fileserver anyway. Again, the choice is a
few characters in /etc/fstab.
Although for Linux there a problem with NFS locking, but let's
pretend they have been fixed for the sake of this discussion :-/


				Regards,

					Richard....