Shrinking Filesystems... is it important?

[Bill Wohler]

shair at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Bob Shair) writes:
>While we're talking about dynamically shrinking filesystems, and whether
>AIX V3 might someday provide that facility, let me ask a purely
>hypothetical question... What's it worth?

bob,

  i can list a couple of examples.  if you're installing some software
  whose size you're not really sure of, you'd want to install it in a
  *very* large filesystem so you don't have to start from scratch if
  you run out of room.  then, after all is installed, then you can
  crank the filesystem down to a more reasonable size so you can
  minimize wasted space.  examples might include unix and x.

  but, here's the golden question.  how many times have you wanted to
  place something in a full filesystem, and instead placed them in
  other filesystems and referenced them via slimelinks?  i would
  venture the answer is "lots" (i have personally done this hundreds
  of times in the last few years).  wouldn't it have been much more
  elegant to make that "other" filesystem smaller, then make the target
  filesystem larger so you could place the software where it belonged
  in the first place?
-- 
						--bw
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Bill Wohler <wohler at sap-ag.de> <sapwdf!wohler>
Heidelberg Red Barons Ultimate Frisbee Team