Feature changed by: Gerald Pfeifer (GeraldPfeifer) Feature #309448, revision 9 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. #3: Michal Vyskocil (mvyskocil) (2010-05-04 12:00:54) (reply to #1) The biggest reason is that this FATE does not recommend the technical solution. You're not right, the advantage is to prevent the filling of the disc on a running system. Your argument about cheaper disc space is true only if you consider new and new hardware. The existing one has typically fixed amount of disc space, should not be wasted by having a lot of unwanted data in /tmp . For instance my five year old laptop has 40GB HDD and 7GB root partition, so it is very sensitive on available space - not all SUSE are in datacenters :-). #2: Guido Berhörster (gberh) (2010-05-04 11:41:11) Cleaning /tmp on bootup and/or periodically through a cronjob is also common practice on all other major Linux distros (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, RHEL/Fedora, Mandriva) and UNIX(-like) OS (e.g. Solaris/Opensolaris, OpenBSD). I'd also really like to hear any use cases and reasons why users would put any valuable data in /tmp (rather than /var/tmp or their homedir) and expect it to persist indefinitely. + #4: Gerald Pfeifer (geraldpfeifer) (2010-05-04 13:25:25) + It's not necessarily (just) about disk size, there is also the aspect + of partitioning and /tmp may not be all that large. + It's also not primarily about data centers (which is not the key focus + of openSUSE), but more individual users or wide spread use not + necessarily governed by professional admins, and there this just + reduces risk assuming we go for a somewhat conservative default (not + just 24 hours). The use case is my significant other's machine (or + mine), not some data center. + For what it's worth, I, for one, don't want to keep all the crap that + tends to pile up under /tmp for years. + And non-expert users, of which we have many, will be surprised what + kind of staff remains under /tmp, leaving behind a trail many won't be + aware of, remaining even after months or years. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/309448