[arch-general] pacman/libalpm/libfetch do not honor TMPDIR

[C Anthony Risinger]

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 5:18 PM, clemens fischer
<ino-news at spotteswoode.dnsalias.org> wrote:
>
> I mean, this is stupid.  Many people keep /tmp in RAM, on a tmpfs, and
> make it big enough, but not too big, as it takes away RAM when getting
> loaded.

there isn't much reason to limit tmpfs or /tmp ... you should be using
a swap device/file/etc to ensure files residing in tmpfs are properly
swapped out in the event memory becomes constrained, or the files are
not in use.  however, i would consider it a bug for applications to
store *very* large files (exceeding 50-100M or so) in /tmp -- /var/tmp
would be more appropriate, even for ephemeral/transient files -- idk
what pacman is using /tmp for specifically, but i doubt it's extremely
large *anything* (briefly extract/read the .INSTALL?).

see: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt

"Some people (including me) find it very convenient to mount it e.g.
on /tmp and /var/tmp and have a big swap partition."

... are you memory constrained?  in reality, you want your RAM 90%+
maxed at ALL times (cache/etc) ... the only time RAM is "wasted" is
when it's not being used at all.

-- 

C Anthony