Paul E Condon wrote: > This report concerning wheezy is being submitted on a squeeze > host. Current situation in wheezy installer is to make /tmp default > to ramfs. Coreutils sort uses /tmp for scratch files. Having 'sort' > use only ram for scratch severly limits its usefulness in sorting > files whose sizes are greater than ram size.
Note that there is also opposite discussion that such a small /tmp isn't the best deployment too. I don't think this is a done deal yet. > Discussion gleened from reading developer discussion list by this > non-developer indicate that some developers believe that Debian > policy is to use /tmp for 'small' temporary files and /var/tmp for > 'large' temporary files. Presuming this belief to be actual policy, > the current coreutils package is not compliant with Debian policy. If this is an operating system policy then this policy should be set by the operating system through the use of the TMPDIR environment variable. If TMPDIR is set then all of the coreutils programs and others will respect that configuration and use that location for all of their temporary files. Therefore while I think this is a more than valid wishlist I think it should be applied to the system's policy layer instead. Coreutils is already flexible enough to comply with this policy if it were made known by the system by setting the TMPDIR variable in the environment. Especially since this is a Debian specific policy it may be and almost certainly will be different on other systems. 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. > To me, it seems reasonable to change coreutils sort default > to use /var/tmp in order to get out of the way of the ramfs > 'improvement' in the installer. For me, it would allow me to avoid > making changes to many little bash scripts that I have written that > use coreutils sort on large files. You already do not need to modify the scripts themselves. Instead you could set TMPDIR yourself to your choice of temporary files. If setting it yourself you might consider setting it to $HOME/tmp or some other user local directory. Bob
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
