how big does /tmp need to be?

[Bob Smith]

> > There's nothing in /tmp that needs to persist between boots, is
> > there?
> 
> By definition.  /usr/tmp is supposed to have files that can persist, but
> Ubuntu has, at times - I'm not sure it's still doing it - set the system up
> in such a way that /tmp, /var/lock and /var/run (and maybe /var/tmp)
> actually get cleaned out on every boot.  This has led to some badly behaved
> packages not working properly because they _expected_ to find an old file
> in /tmp.

Thanks!