Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Ruby is borked on my system

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

On Friday 27 June 2014 21:58:23 Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Jun 2014 12:39:29 -0400, covici@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