Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-packaging (172 mails)

[Andreas Jaeger <aj@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Looking at the failures, I wrote up the following and will post it as blog 
post later - anything wrong or missing on this?

Feature #303793 (https://features.opensuse.org/303793) proposes to
 mount /var/run as tmpfs.

The description says: 

  "This would avoid the cleaning of stale files or
   sockets on bootup and avoid atime updates of any mounted
   filesystems. This is required for eg powermanagement, which
   currently wakes up the system from any idle states for a socket
   operation.

   Services must be modified not to depend on a preexisting content in
   /var/run upon startup. RPMs must be modified to not place anything
   there."

An rpmlint check has now been implemented to catch files packaged in
/var/run to notify package maintainers of this.  This output of the
rpmlint check is e.g.:

hal.x86_64: E: dir-or-file-in-var-run (Badness: 900) /var/run/hald/hald-
runner


So, what options do we have to fix this in packages?

* Check that /var/run is the right place. If you have a home directory
  in /var/run with content, consider using /var/lib and remember to
  handle the update of the package for users, e.g. use "usermod" in
  the post install script of the package to change existing users.
* Create the directory on invocation of your program.  Many programs
  already do this, so you might not need to make any changes.
  Otherwise you have the following options:
  - have the program itself check for the directory and create it with
    correct permissions
  - if the program is normally invoked from an init script, enhance
    the init script to do this, e.g.:
        if [ ! -d $HALDAEMON_PIDDIR ]; then
                mkdir -p $HALDAEMON_PIDDIR
                chown haldaemon:haldaemon $HALDAEMON_PIDDIR
        fi
  - Place a script in /etc/tmpdirs.d that creates the directories and
    files, you can look at /etc/tmpdirs.d/01_aaa_base from package
    aaa_base for an example.
  Note that the first option is the preferred one since it does not
  invoke calling of any other programs, the second one comes next
  since for both the first and the second one the directories are only
  created when needed - and the last one is something for directories
  that are always needed since it's called at every boot.
* Make the file or directory known to rpm but do not package it -
use %ghost in the rpm spec file list, e.g.:
%attr(-,avahi,avahi) %ghost %{_localstatedir}/run/avahi-daemon

Andreas
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE,  aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org}
  Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi
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