On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 04:14:00PM +1000, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 03:20:09PM +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 10:47:09PM -0600, Jamin W. Collins wrote: > > > On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 06:26:00PM -0500, Steve Greenland wrote: > > > > Is it wrong for package foobar to 'rm -rf /var/cache/foobar' when it > > > > is purged? > > > > > > Yes. Blindly removing any folder is bad. > > > > So rm -rf /var/log/apache/* is OK then? If not, why is it OK for programs > > to clean /tmp? > > That would be because it's /tmp. /var/log is not /tmp/log. That's like saying "the sun rises because it's round". /tmp gets cleaned because there's a policy that says "/tmp gets cleaned". Similarly, there's a policy that says "logs get removed". It's probably not completely clear, and could do with a clarification, about whether that only includes logs generated as part of a default installation, or whether it should be all logs that might have been created by the package during it's lifetime. I'd prefer it to be the latter, since (a) what's default at remove might not have been default at install / last configuration, and (b) we have a quite reasonable method of removing the package's regular files without getting rid of logfiles -- it's called 'remove'. - Matt
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