Paul E Condon wrote: > Bob Proulx wrote: > > You already do not need to modify the scripts themselves. Instead you > > could set TMPDIR yourself to your choice of temporary files. If > > Yes, I can use TMPDIR, but my preferred solution is to have 'sort' use > disk space in the root file system (/), where it shares the physical > disk space resource with /boot, /etc, /bin, et cetera. > > But tmpfs implementation seems not to allow that.
That can't be coreutils fault now can it? Sure Debian now defaults to a tmpfs /tmp (which I don't like) and there isn't another directory in your root (/) filesystem where temporary files can be stored. But there isn't any change to the coreutils package for that. It can only be to either use or create a different directory, perhaps /var/tmp, or or avoid the use of the tmpfs. > If I simply set TMPDIR='/tmp' , I get the tmpfs version to /tmp which > is in ram, and does not meet needs of disk scratch space for sorting > files that are located on physical disk. Agreed. Perhaps setting TMPDIR=/var/tmp or TMPDIR=$HOME/tmp would be better choices. > > setting it yourself you might consider setting it to $HOME/tmp or some > > Another feature of the new installer seems to be putting the whole of > the root file system in something called rootfs, which seems to be a > specialized version of tmpfs. My quick tests indicate that specifying Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with the lastest Wheezy installer behavior. I should test it and see. > TMPDIR as any string that expands to a path containing any of the > standard, well known top level directories will fail in unexpected > ways. (maybe not entirely unexpected, now that the issue has been > raised, I hope, but surely unintended) I've tested /home, /mnt, > /media. There is a problem here for traditional users of coreutils > sort. (I can use a mounted external drive whose mount point is in > /media, ... is that a nice clean solution???) Could you show an error message from one of these unexpected ways? For those of us not testing the Wheezy installer yet? I am generally installing Stable and then upgrading from there. But of course we will want the new installer to be well tested before the next release. > My own opinion is that the tmpfs usage in wheezy needs some serious > rethinking and my wish is that its impact on ordinary, traditional, I am not happy with it either. I have been turning it off with /etc/default/rcS RAMTMP=no so that I get the behavior I desire. > everyday use of coreutils be considered adequately during the > rethinking. Maybe installation really needs tmpfs to be done cleanly, > but maybe it can be made to clean up after itself so that the > installed system looks like tmpfs was never used, and has not left > busy tmpfs directories for the user to deal with. Sorry, I didn't understand what you meant with the above. > Note, in particular, that my suggestion to default to /var/tmp cannot > help solve the real problem, so consider it withdrawn. But the problem > remains. Using TMPDIR=/var/tmp is similarly troubled if someone is using /var on a separate partition and it is also small. But most people using /var on a separate partition already know how to deal with such issues. Personally I use LVM and am able to resize them dynamically. > > Additionally trying to modify each and every program on the system > > would be an endless task of chasing down yet another package. There > > are a very large number of programs in Debian. Modifying all of > > them individually would be a maintenance and tracking nightmare. > > However most of them should already be respecting the TMPDIR > > variable. Therefore setting it globally would handle all of the > > programs uniformly. > > So, TMPDIR is, itself, a Debian policy, In so much as TMPDIR itself is already a standard. See the online standards docs here: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap08.html#tag_08_03 > and current wheezy seems from my testing to break policy compliant > use of TMPDIR. In what way is use of TMPDIR broken? An example here would really help to clear up the confusion. Bob
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