/usr/portsnap vs. /var/db/portsnap

[Colin Percival]

Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-Aug-06 01:59:57 -0700, Colin Percival wrote:
>>I'm going to be bringing portsnap into the base system very soon, and
>>roughly 50MB and 13000 inodes.
> 
> The number of inodes does seem rather high (I gather it's one per
> port).  Have you considered using an alternative mechanism to store
> the data?  ar(1), dbm(3) and zip(1) would all seem possible options
> (though zip isn't in the base system).  The downside is that updating
> would be far more expensive in disk space.

I considered it, but for performance reasons it is much better to keep
each port as a separate file.

> I think it would be nicer to have it in /var.  I suspect that that
> many inodes may present problems for some people whereever you put it.

I don't think 13000 inodes will be a big problem on /usr for most people.
The rather small drive on my laptop has two million inodes allocated for
/usr.

> Maybe you need to make the location an option (either compile time or
> in a configuration file)

It is configurable.

Ok, I'll make /var/db/portsnap the default and tell people to change
that in /etc/portsnap.conf if they want.

Colin Percival