Re: Elastic Quota File System (EQFS)

[Rob Couto <rpc@cafe4111.org>]

On Saturday 26 June 2004 07:16 pm, Stephen Wille Padnos wrote:

> I think you missed one of the main points - you don't get any extra
> space until you mark some of your files as elastic.
> You're right - under this system, nobody would get any space from
> deletion of your files because you would use the system as a normal hard
> quota system - you would mark no files as elastic, and would therefore
> be limited to your quota (in the example you gave, you would not be
> using 110M, because your quota would have limited you to 100M).  If you
> were so kind as to mark something as elastic (say, that recently
> doneloaded install tarball of the Gimp), then you would remove the
> storage taken by those files from your quota usage and would have more
> space available, with the risk that the elastic files might not stick
> around.
>
> Under no circumstance would you lose any file that fits under your quota.

-snip-

> Controlled by you using one of the methods that have been suggested:
> a .elastic file/directory structure
> /scratch/ space usage
> a filesystem that can keep track of these things, and a program like chmod
> xattrs and other userspace tools
>
> etc.
>
> - Steve

It looks (to my untrained eyes) like a user-driven caching "algorithm", where 
I can keep these KDE tarballs around next to the kernel sources, and a few 
shiny new slackware ISOs, and all are of course  replaceable, but I mark them 
elastic or put them in /scratch/... to recover my space at the cost of an 
increased probability that I'll have to download some of them again. I like 
it.

-- 
Rob Couto [rpc@cafe4111.org]
computer safety tip: use only a non-conducting, static-free hammer.
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