I really hope we can get to a new generation of filesystems soon. Something closer to what ZFS is now. It frustrates me that I have an 80GB disk and I have to allocate portions of it to each of these tasks and try to correctly estimate in advance what each one will use. Eventually it will turn out I mis-estimated and it will be a pain to juggle already-filled partitions.
With a system like ZFS, you create logical filesystems essentially at a folder level. So you can say that /tmp is noexec and has a quota of 20GB but a reserved space of 2 GB. You can also make sure that your root drive has at least 10GB reserved, so even if /var fills up, you still have at least 10GB for your root space.
And this is without heavyweight partitioning, things are easily modifiable on the fly, and you still get constant-time snapshots.
Fortunately, logical volume managers exist and do help.
With a system like ZFS, you create logical filesystems essentially at a folder level. So you can say that /tmp is noexec and has a quota of 20GB but a reserved space of 2 GB. You can also make sure that your root drive has at least 10GB reserved, so even if /var fills up, you still have at least 10GB for your root space.
And this is without heavyweight partitioning, things are easily modifiable on the fly, and you still get constant-time snapshots.
Fortunately, logical volume managers exist and do help.