Re: Why do we have to support tmpfs for /var/run (policy changes in 3.8.1)
Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org> writes:
> 1.) It's not the default on Debian anyway
It is, however, a standard and supported option and it's the default in
Ubuntu. The FHS is silent about directories in /var/run across reboots
but requires that all files in /var/run be deleted on reboot.
> 4.) You have to manually cleanup in postrm. (I guess most packages will forget
> that, leaving cruft around)
If you're creating any files in /var/run during the operation of the
package (and if not, why do you have a directory in /var/run in the first
place?), then you have to do this anyway, so this isn't new. (Well, I
suppose you could just rely on the next reboot deleting them, but that
doesn't feel very clean and I'm not sure that's really in the spirit of
our requirements.)
> 5.) If your package does not have an init script (I happen to maintain
> two such packages), I now have to create init scripts simply to create a
> /var/run directory. That's insane and even more wasting cpu cycles.
Could you provide more details about what package without an init script
uses /var/run? The only other case that I can think of is packages that
create transient UNIX-domain sockets.
> As I said, I don't see the benefit of a tmpfs for /var/run which would
> justify this policy change so would very much appreciate to here valid
> reasons for this change.
Did you already read the Policy bug? It contains a rationale, although I
don't know if it's a complete enough one for you.
> For people, that want to use a tmpfs for /var/run, there could be a
> script on shutdown which backups (or copies) the content of /var/run and
> restores it on boot
I assume you mean only the directory structure? Otherwise, this would be
an FHS violation.
Personally, I'm not inclined to revert this change. I think it's correct
and continues to be correct, and I'd rather not undo the work that's
already been put into making it work. This was added to Policy in part
because of various bug reports against packages not working as expected,
so removing it from Policy won't make those bug reports go away again.
And I think it's better to fix the packages than to add something to
preserve /var/run directories across boot, which seems like a hack to me.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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