On Friday 27 June 2014 21:58:23 Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Fri, 27 Jun 2014 12:39:29 -0400, cov...@ccs.covici.com wrote: > > > Some months ago I found myself wondering why I had ruby on this box > > > at all. A little poking around revealed that the only thing that > > > needed it was thin- provisioning. Once I'd added -thin to my USE > > > flags and recompiled lvm2 I could get rid of ruby altogether. > > > > > > This won't suit everybody, I know, but maybe it's worth considering. > > > > What exactly does this do -- is it for a thin client or something? > > No, it's an LVM feature. It's one of those "if you don't know what it is > you don't need it" type features so I don't understand whey it is enabled > by default in the ebuild.
It's a daft name, too, IMO. "Over-commit" would be better. > Thin volumes in LVM use only the space they need, so the space you > allocate to them, so you can create volumes with a total size greater > than the available disk space. ...and although I dare say some installations may need it, and know how to manage the risk, I certainly don't want to wake up one day to find I've overflowed my partitions, so I ditched it as soon as I found it. Enough things go bump in the night as it is, without adding to them needlessly. Result: ruby-coloured peace. It's even worse than you said, Neil; on this ordinary KDE box* with 943 packages installed, thin-provisioning in lvm2 is the only thing that needs ruby. So not only is it a "you don't need it" feature, it brings in layers of complexity and head-scratching for ordinary mortals, quite out of proportion to the "benefits". * Well, ordinary apart from using two disks in software RAID-1 and LVM, that is. -- Regards Peter
