FreeBSD Handbook - 2.6 Allocating Disk Space

[Marc Fonvieille]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2007 at 10:32:59PM +0300, Lauri Suoranta wrote:
>  Above-mentioned chapter has table 2-2 as a suggestion how to partition a 
>  disk. It suggests to allocate 50 MB partition for /var. That seems to be a 
>  bad idea because pkg_add needs lots of space there while installing 
>  packages. Many installations will fail unless you tweak pkg_add's path 
>  variables.

According to pkg_add(1) manual page:

The environment variables PKG_TMPDIR and TMPDIR, in that order, are
taken to name temporary directories where pkg_add will attempt to create
its staging area in.  If these variables are not present or if the
directo- ries named lack sufficient space, then pkg_add will use the
first of /var/tmp, /tmp or /usr/tmp with sufficient space.

But I think 50MB is not enough, just because people may use portsnap,
here's what I have on my workstation:

/var/db% du -sh
167M    .

200MB seems closer to what one will need.

-- 
Marc