Re: node-like file conflicts

2012-08-06 Thread Weldon Goree
On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 16:15 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:

 I'll double check the facts of course.  If I have also see if I can
 understand the situation in each case well enough to make a
 recommendation.  It seems at the very least that many of these issues
 are within a particular family of packages.  Hopefully they won't
 mostly be as bad as node.

It would also probably be good to distinguish between pairs that have
the same binary name offering essentially the same semantics (e.g. crm
and crm114) and unrelated binaries that happen to have the same name
(e.g. lid and libuser).

Also siggen is paired with itself in that list.

Weldon


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Re: node-like file conflicts

2012-08-06 Thread Weldon Goree
On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 17:39 +0200, Jakub Wilk wrote:

 No, the list is in format:

D'oh. Thanks. I'll still see if I can tease out which of those are
binaries trying to do the same thing and which are completely unrelated.

Weldon


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Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useless

2012-05-28 Thread Weldon Goree
On Mon, 28 May 2012 13:03:47 +0200
Toni Mueller t...@debian.org wrote:
 It's not, see below. Also, most of the time, /tmp goes into / (on
 smaller systems), and is thus typically *very* much limited in space.

If the theory is to design for the trained chicken install (and it still is, 
right?), then / gets the entire disk minus whatever gets assigned to swap. The 
sort of administrator who knows why she would want /home, /usr, and /var 
mounted separately can also be trusted to do whatever the right thing for her 
situation is with /tmp. 

HOWEVER, what's currently missing is the ability in the installer to put /tmp 
on / (AFAICT). Giving it a partition puts it on disk, not doing anything puts 
it on tmpfs. Yes, it's a single-line change to fstab on your first boot, but 
still.

Over the past decade or so of writing one-off scripts I have (rightly or 
wrongly) formed the habit that /tmp is a 1777 area of disk where I can dump 
large things I don't want in memory at the moment (and therefore also a poor 
man's very asynchronous IPC domain -- yes, it's not supposed to be, but I think 
we'll also all admit we've done that at some point). Much better developers 
than me seem to have formed this opinion too (cf browsers' behavior while it 
waits for you to tell it what to do with an unknown content-type: it's a 
disk-based pipe to whatever program you pick to open it, except now it's a 
memory-based pipe, and I think /tmp on tmpfs is breaking those developers' 
expectations). We may be wrong, but apparently a lot of us don't yet trust the 
swapping algorithm to put the right stuff on disk yet. Also, I'd be more 
comfortable with tmpfs if it could be quota'd with standard quota tools.

 Having /var/run on a tmpfs may be a good idea, though.

Gah! I want *somewhere* I can park stuff on disk. Why are people so against 
that? Can we at least keep /var/tmp? (But I'm more worried about /var filling 
up than /, personally.) And how many of these are we going to do? Right now on 
my Squeeze laptop I have /lib/init/rw, /dev/shm, and /tmp. Do we really need 
more things that look like on-disk directories but aren't? (Then again I'm 
still grumpy about sysfs.) Though actually /var/run makes more sense than /tmp, 
since it's pretty much just for pids and sockets.

 
 I request that the bug be tagged wontfix.

Despite what I said above, I agree. The argument about web applications' 
session info is persuasive, and that's probably the hardest set of apps to 
change. As long as we are sure programs aren't dropping arbitrarily large files 
into it (I'm looking at you, Iceweasel...) and as long as there's *some* 
section of actual disk somewhere that's 1777. 

Also, this is rapidly approaching two sets of choir-preaching, so I'll bow out 
after this.

Cheers,
Weldon


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Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs is fine

2012-05-28 Thread Weldon Goree
On Tue, 2012-05-29 at 12:15 +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
 What's the folder structure in /tmp then? /tmp/something/$USER?

It's the Wild West over there. You'll often see something
like /tmp/$procname/$pid/blah or /tmp/$procname/$user/blah, or
just /tmp/$some_hash_of_who_knows_what/blah. 

FHS is uncharacteristically laconic:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#TMPTEMPORARYFILES

Weldon




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Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useful

2012-05-26 Thread Weldon Goree
On Fri, 25 May 2012 21:56:55 -0400
Ted Ts'o ty...@mit.edu wrote:

 
 The major difference is that tmpfs pages only get written out to swap
 when the system is under memory pressure.  In contrast, pages which
 are backed by a filesystem will start being written to disk after 30
 seconds _or_ if the system is under memory pressure.
 

I still think the major difference is that page cache - ext2 can be quota'd 
while tmpfs - swap cannot (AFAIK; has that changed in the past couple of 
years?). This may be good or bad depending on your use case.

 
 And if you consider how much memory most desktop/laptops have, and how
 often people **really** are downloading multi-gigabyte files to /tmp
 (note that browsers tend to default downloads to ~/Downloads)

Browsers write files to ~/Downloads (or ~/Desktop) *when the user selects Save 
As*. On Iceweasel and Chrome at least, if you click a link to a content-type 
the browser cannot natively display, it downloads it to /tmp while it's waiting 
for you to tell it what to do with it. These files can be arbitrarily large.

Weldon


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Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useless

2012-05-26 Thread Weldon Goree
On Fri, 25 May 2012 15:12:03 -0400
Nikolaus Rath nikol...@rath.org wrote:

 Weldon Goree wel...@b.rontosaur.us writes:
  If only ext*fs supported quotas...
 
 Aren't quotas only for non-root and per file system? I think we're
 already safe from non-root filling up / because of the reserved 5%.

Yes, but I was thinking of a multi-user install (that being, after all, what I 
administer for a living). I like the ability to keep ~fred and ~joe from 
locking each other out of /tmp (yes, there are ways to do that with tmpfs, but 
I have to think about them, unlike quotaing a normal filesystem). Then again, 
with virtualization the days of multiple-interactive-user installations may be 
coming to an end. 

Cheers,
Weldon


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Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useless

2012-05-25 Thread Weldon Goree
On Fri, 2012-05-25 at 10:02 -0400, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
 I think having / and /tmp share the same file system is a bad idea,
 because then writing lots of stuff to /tmp would potentially fill up the
 root file system (that typically also includes /var) and then cause a
 lot of breakage.

If only ext*fs supported quotas...

(Snark aside, does tmpfs support quotas yet/will it ever?)

Weldon


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Re: RFC: OpenRC as Init System for Debian

2012-05-09 Thread Weldon Goree
On Wed, 2012-05-09 at 21:57 +0800, Patrick Lauer wrote:

 Why this arbitrary limit to only one application?
 
 http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?part=3chap=4
 
 Something along those lines makes life a lot easier and avoids these
 schizophrenic hacks around package managers that don't respect files -
 but it needs support in the package manager to work reliably.

Years ago I nearly had a heart attack when I saw the following output
from etc-update:

Merging trivial changes to fstab

Doesn't Arch have a setup where foo.conf includes foo.conf.local (or
conf.d/foo, or something; I get frustrated with Arch about 2 minutes
after booting, usually) for anything the user edits? Personally I'd
rather have a set of files that I know the distribution may blow away at
any moment and a separate set of files that I know the distribution will
never alter. I get that a change to the semantics of a configuration
file may require user-altered stuff to change, but even dispatch-conf
doesn't help with that.

Weldon



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