how big does /tmp need to be?

[Adam Funk]

On 2008-08-14, Derek Broughton wrote:

> LOL.  I have to admit, I didn't think about things like video. _video_ never
> goes to /tmp on my system.  Specifically because it always wants to use a
> lot more space than I have in /tmp.
>
> I used to make a really, really, big swap partition, and put /tmp in tmpfs
> (ie, it uses part of the swap).  Then I figured I wasn't really wasting
> space.  But Ubuntu bollixed that and I never got around to fixing it.

I haven't tried using tmpfs --- why does it not work in Ubuntu?