Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Concerns about WIPE_TMP change

[Olivier Galibert <galibert@pobox.com>]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 10:18:35PM +0000, Duncan wrote:
> Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> posted 4791F359.1050500@gentoo.org,
> excerpted below, on  Sat, 19 Jan 2008 07:55:53 -0500:
> 
> > I think that this would probably warrant an elog.  Sure, anybody who
> > knows the "correct" way to admin unix doesn't put anything important in
> > /tmp - but educating our users before blowing away their data isn't a
> > bad thing.  We shouldn't assume our users are idiots, but this is an
> > obscure enough piece of admin knowledge that I think that users will be
> > impacted by the change.
> 
> Obscure?  It's the directory name (says another with both /tmp and /var/
> tmp on tmpfs).  How much less obscure can you get than announcing it 
> every time the path is referenced or specified?  Who could reasonably 
> argue that tmp doesn't mean tmp?

Tmp has never meant "erase at restart", because restarts are often not
predictable.  Tmp has sometimes meant things like "erased after a
week", or "erased when space gets low", but never "erased after
restart" which is just unusable.

Frankly, if I'm writing a long email (which mutt stores in /tmp) and a
powerloss makes it gone even if I was saving it from time to time
while I was writing it, I'll get annoyed.  Severely annoyed.

It's just another bug of the FHS that shoule be ignored.

  OG.
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