[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#630615: #630615: RAMTMP should default to no

[Joey Hess]

The major flaw in Roger's reasoning in
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=630615#50
is that he does not consider the straight-line default install.
That default is to make one large filesystem for /, with only a small
additional partition for swap (and in some cases one for /boot).

So the default on Debian systems for basically forever (at least since
there has been a d-i) has been for a large amount of space available for
/tmp. Every single person who has run into problems with a too small
/tmp, then, has made an active decision that resulted in their problems.
Before, we gave them enough rope, but we did not force them to tie a knot
in it. Now we've got the noose cleverly positioned just above the pillow
they're sleeping on.

In other words, the release of Wheezy threatens to reduce what has
increased over time from typically 20 gb, 80 gb, 200 gb, or 1+ tb
of space available for /tmp; to sizes that range from 5 mb to 800 mb.

I've taken the liberty of assigning several bugs to initscripts that
point to real user experiences where the tmpfs /tmp causes problems.
(#665634, #665635, #665631, #665406)
(Conceivably these bugs could be instead assigned to all the programs
that are using /tmp. Or they could be merged into this one.
Any preference for future bugs?)

The choice to not make this change on upgrade has essentially prevented
us from testing and quantifying the problems that result. So we can
expect a great deal many more problems to turn up as more and more less
and less experienced users are exposed to Wheezy in new installs.

Roger's interest in having d-i provide configurability of the tmpfs is
admirable, but unfortunatly d-i has few developers, especially partman
developers. And #633299 seems to be all about providing configurability,
rather than affecting the installation defaults. Also, there is not
really a lot of time to develop d-i left.

I feel that the only sane option at this point is to revert the change,
or have d-i force it *off*, perhaps on all except the largest memory
systems. (Or Steve suggested, take it to the technical committee.)

-- 
see shy jo
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