Re: Moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it useless

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org> writes:
> ACK. /tmp on tmpfs is a nice hack (I use it myself!), but it's a
> terrible default.

I can't say whether it's a good default or not (though it seems to
work pretty well in practice), but the OP's argument is completely
silly.  Most apps use /tmp not for "reducing memory usage", but for
communicating with other apps (of course, often, such as in a shell
script, or indeed the user himself, the choice of /tmp is not done by
the app itself, but by the invoker) -- it's a common namespace.

Of course it's the rare exceptions to this that cause problems;
whether there are enough such exceptions to make the default a bad
idea, I dunno.  [apparently my /tmp got switched over to tmpfs by some
automatic upgrade, and it took me _months_ to even notice...]

-miles

-- 
Mayonnaise, n. One of the sauces that serve the French in place of a state
religion.