running out of space in /usr (rambling)

[Joel Rees]

4.7-RELEASE:

I originally gave /usr 2G, and I just recently tried to install perl 5.8.
It ran out of space in three places, so I started cleaning /usr up. It
was up to 83%, then I did a make clean in php4 and several other places,
and got it down to 78%. 

So, I used disklabel to allocate the rest of the 10G slice fBSD is
living in to a new partition and disklable gave it the letter "d".

(Why doesn't disklabel give out "d" in sequence? I think I read
something once, but I don't remember, can't find it in a casual glance
through the FAQ.)

Anyway, I told disklabel to mount the "d" partition as /usr/prod, did 

    sudo cp -Rp /usr/ports /usr/prod
    sudo rm -R /usr/ports
    sudo mkdir /usr/ports

Then I edited /etc/fstab, adding a line for the "d" drive and setting it
to mount at /usr/ports. Rebooted and it _looks_ like I'm okay. (Actually,
/usr is only down to 53%, so I'm probably going to use fdisk to give the
other 10G I was saving for a rainy day to fBSD, reformat the whole thing,
and re-install, using this as an excuse to go to 4.8-STABLE.)

Question -- Is cp -Rp the recommended way to move the contents of a
subdirectory to a new partition? Even though I'm the only user on the
machine, I should have done the copying in single-user mode, right?

And one more, is the limit of 8 partitions in an fdisk slice every going
away?

-- 
Joel Rees <joel at alpsgiken.gr.jp>