Bug#1115317: Technical Committee resolution on /var/lock and systemd

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org>]

On Tue, Oct 07, 2025 at 01:54:10PM +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:

> I agree with everything in your e-mail, but it seems entirely possible
> to reach the same goal by having /var/lock be "owned" by some other
> package instead of systemd, which apparently have little interest to
> support /var/lock.  I can sympathise with systemd upstream on that, and
> their desire to drop everything about /var/lock.  Moving ownership of
> /var/lock to another package, e.g., a NEW 'var-lock' package, may be a
> friendlier way forward to everyone.
> 
> Is there a reason the /var/lock directory MUST be provided by systemd
> and no other package could provide it?
> 
> Then all packages that need /var/lock in Debian can depend on this
> 'var-lock' package, which would also allow us to better track which
> packages still use this suboptimal interface for device locking.  Or
> just move the directory to 'base-files' or similar.

Please note that /var/lock is just a symlink to /run/lock, and both
base-files and systemd agree that such symlink should exist (even
if their implementation differ a little).

Since /run/lock is volatile, base-files is a bad place to keep the
real directory.

Thanks.