Re: [9fans] full fossil follies

["Ethan Gardener" <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Fri, Jun 25, 2021, at 5:45 PM, adr via 9fans wrote:
> 
> In a multi-user environment you can make the file system do something
> similar when the system is full, but instead of starting a console
> session, delete the last file modified and presenting the user
> an error.

The last file modified could be the log file which documents what went wrong. ;) I thought this through years ago, it's an annoying problem. I think the current situation isn't too bad. If I remember right, it's much better than CWFS, but I don't remember too clearly. I do remember my early Linux experience, trying to arrange several 100-200MB disks in such a way as to have both Emacs and X installed at the same time. (Impossible!) I was also root all the time because A: I didn't know what it was, and B: non-root authentication was broken in that release of that distro and I didn't know how to use the patch disks. My tiny disks inevitably filled up and somehow I managed to deal with them. (It helped that I had no data to lose, having just lost everything I wanted to keep from DOS, but it was still annoying.) It was harder than dealing with a full Fossil because Linux had no ramdisk at the time, I don't think there were any live CDs, and Linux didn't yet support `init=/bin/sh`. I don't think I understood how to start it in runlevel 1, or maybe I did everything in runlevel 1 so when that went wrong, I had to do something else. Sometimes, I had to unplug all the drives but the root, edit the boot config to make a recovery system, plug the drives back in... etc. By comparison, booting a Plan 9 iso and mounting Fossil is very simple and easy! :D It's essentially the same as how I'd repair any OS with a full disk today. Wonderful things, live-CDs.

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