> I'm relucatant to just throw away the temporary disk file altogether
> since there's a comment in tables.c saying:
> 
> 	* ... The
> 	* goal was speed and the ability to work with HUGE archives.
> 
> That said, extracting base.tgz from i386 1.4.1 results in a 24437 byte
> file in /tmp with info for 441 directories.  The value of HUGE would

Think 16-bit 64k systems and then it makes more sense.

Having fought a number of pitched battles with install floppy building
tools lately, I plan to work up something post-1.4.2 that autosizes the
memory disk based on constraints we give it. One such constraint can be
that there must be "N" KB free for things like /tmp files -- not just pax,
but also manual troubleshooting finds the space to be quite handy.

It's either that or teaching sysinst to always mount a 128k MFS on /tmp
or something like that. But if the MFS support in the kernel is considered
to be too big (I think some ports leave it out of their INSTALL kernels),
then perhaps not.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com