Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (715 mails)

[Hans Witvliet <suse@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2012-03-30 at 18:34 -0400, Brian K. White wrote:

<trim>
> The answer isn't to try to think of every possible occurrence and 
> somehow come up with an answer for them all. The answer is to realize 
> that the uses for /tmp are unknowable on a general-purpose OS and 
> therefor it's not something that should be changed by default on a 
> general-purpose OS. Even ~/tmp isn't necessarily safe since /tmp has 
> already been well defined for ages as a single shared space. There are 
> apps that _rely_ on that fact and use /tmp as a form or inter-process 
> communication, and others where it's not exactly required, just stupid 
> and inefficient to have every user have their own redundant identical 
> copy of some large file(s). And as has been mentioned already, most 
> often, if an app is using a file in /tmp, it's for a reason. In case the 
> implication of that blows by you it means if the app developer wanted to 
> use ram, he'd have used ram. If he wanted to use per-user file space 
> he'd have used ~/tmp. Sometimes /tmp is used either unnecessarily or 
> even wrongly, but it's not for YOU to unilaterally accuse ALL software 
> of that, and change the definition of /tmp right out from under 30 years 
> of unix software.
<trim>

So,
People should remember what "tmp" is for.
A general-purpose bitbucket, that anybody can use as scratchpad
(allowing to circumvent a strict limit on home-directories) while his
program runs. No promises for how long it remains there. Could be weeks,
or just five minutes...
Some traditional unices don't even bother removing files there, they
just do a "newfs" after reboot. But afaicr, there there never was an
explicit reference to the available space there, although limiting it to
the amount of RAM+swap isn't quite sensoble, not?

In the ever continuing quest for faster responding systems, tmpfs has
obviously advantages. Whether or not /tmp should be one of them is
debatable. If you want lightning fast scratchpad: absolutely! If you are
sloppy (forgetting to cleanup) also.
If you want to accomodate resource-pigs, absolutely not.


hans
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