Feature changed by: Per Jessen (pjessen) Feature #309448, revision 4 Title: Clean temporary data in SUSE openSUSE-11.3: Unconfirmed Priority Requester: Mandatory Requested by: Michal Vyskocil (mvyskocil) Description: The current default behavior of SUSE is not touch files in /tmp and others to prevent an unwanted data lost. There are at least two requests willing to change it somehow: * FATE#307510: Cron: set MAX_DAYS_IN_TMP different from 0 * bug#594778 - RN: include tmpwatch in a pattern The pros: * The common meaining of /tmp is that is for temporary data. FHS says - "Programs must not assume that any files or directories in /tmp are preserved between invocations of the program". FHS also allows the removal of a content of /var/tmp and /var/cache , even if those directories should be more persistent as /tmp . * As SUSE places the /tmp and /var on root partition by default and not remove the content of it, the free space should be simply eaten. There are a lot of applications in SUSE distribution that stores a lot of data inside those dirs, but because of the common meaning - they not removed them. For instance - Mozilla Firefox, ssh, gpg, kde, mc, Adobe Flash, and many others. The other way is to fix all of those programs to safely remove all content they store in /tmp after it's not needed. The cons: * Strictly speaking the not removal of /tmp and others is not againts FHS. * Change of the default is dangerous, especially if we are talking about files removal, because long time SUSE users might rely on this specific behavior of SUSE. * The default should be SAFE and not removing of files is considered as a safe default. Please note this FATE is not about concrete technical solution (existing scron script, tmwatch, tmpfs, /dev/shm, or something else). The question is - change the default behavior to remove temporary files, or not ? And if so, which ones and how often. + Discussion: + #1: Per Jessen (pjessen) (2010-05-04 11:31:51) + I'm not really sure how this differs from feature 307510, but never + mind - the only advantage of this change is to save disk space. Disk + space is becoming cheaper by the minute and Terabyte is no longer an + exotic amount reserved for large datacentres. I say we keep the safe + default in openSUSE, and leave it to the sysadmin to do the one-line + change if he or she wants to automatically purge temporary files. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/309448