User mail spool partitioning mystery

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2015-01-16 at 17:02 -0600, Patrick Goetz wrote: 
> That's it! Thanks for the heads up!  I assumed that all the spool hash 
> options only applied when you actually have more than one partition, 
> which I don't.

Yep, the phrasing in the man-page is not clear.  In the past it has
confused me as well.

> Unfortunately this is going to complicate my ability to use the 
> excellent migration plan outlined by Nic Berstein on 2014-12-19. 
> mailboxes.db will know about the spool files in their old, hashed 
> location, which I'd like to get rid of, since all the mail resides on 
> one physical partition anyway, so having it set up this way just adds 
> unnecessary directory structures.

I do not see how they add "unnecessary directory structures", the point
of hashing is to avoid very large [fat] directories by making the tree
deeper and more narrow verses fat and shallow.  In some cases [albeit in
large part historic] this improves performance due to technicalities of
file-system operation.

I would recommend just keeping the hashes if that is what you have now.
There no significant benefit to eliminating them.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam at whitemice.org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA