Re: Perhaps programs should create the subdirectories they use for their temporary files
On Saturday 04 April 2009 19:00:54 Guus Sliepen wrote: On Sat, Apr 04, 2009 at 01:54:07AM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote: contact a running daemon. Could you explain what policykit uses /var/run for, and educate me a bit on why D-Bus services have to put things in /var/run but don't have init scripts? PolicyKit stores credentials in /var/run/PolicyKit which are of temporary nature and are automatically cleaned up on boot. I maintain a lot of systems that run on CompactFlash cards of a few GB, but also have 1 or 2 GB of RAM. I mount a tmpfs over /var/cache/apt/archives, so I can upgrade the system without using a large amount of space on flash, and to prevent wear. Apt always complains about /var/cache/apt/archives/partial not being there, so I either have to write an init script that creates it after the tmpfs is mounted, or (what I normally do is to) have a small script to perform updates, which creates the missing directories. The problem is that some programs (apt-get, PolicyKit, etc.) store temporary files in /var/run or /var/cache in their own subdirectories, but expect something else to create these directories for them. I think we should require these programs to create their own subdirectories at runtime. It is very simple to add an mkdir() command to these programs. If the directory already exists, it is a no-op. wpa_supplicant and hostapd do this, and saves all this bollucks about providing an initscript for this sole purpose. Thanks for mentioning it Guus. Thanks, Kel. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Perhaps programs should create the subdirectories they use for their temporary files
On Sat, 2009-04-04 at 11:00 +0200, Guus Sliepen wrote: The problem is that some programs (apt-get, PolicyKit, etc.) store temporary files in /var/run or /var/cache in their own subdirectories, but expect something else to create these directories for them. I think we should require these programs to create their own subdirectories at runtime. It is very simple to add an mkdir() command to these programs. If the directory already exists, it is a no-op. ...until such a program needs to run as non-root, and then mkdir() at runtime doesn't help anything. /var/run/PolicyKit/ is 770 root:polkituser, probably for this reason. Cheers, Julien -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
Re: Perhaps programs should create the subdirectories they use for their temporary files
On Sat, Apr 04, 2009 at 11:00:54AM +0200, Guus Sliepen wrote: I maintain a lot of systems that run on CompactFlash cards of a few GB, but also have 1 or 2 GB of RAM. I mount a tmpfs over /var/cache/apt/archives, so I can upgrade the system without using a large amount of space on flash, and to prevent wear. Apt always complains about /var/cache/apt/archives/partial not being there, so I either have to write an init script that creates it after the tmpfs is mounted, or (what I normally do is to) have a small script to perform updates, which creates the missing directories. The problem is that some programs (apt-get, PolicyKit, etc.) store temporary files in /var/run or /var/cache in their own subdirectories, but expect something else to create these directories for them. I think we should require these programs to create their own subdirectories at runtime. It is very simple to add an mkdir() command to these programs. If the directory already exists, it is a no-op. /var/cache is intended for cached data from applications. Such data is locally generated as a result of time-consuming I/O or calculation. The application must be able to regenerate or restore the data. Unlike /var/spool, the cached files can be deleted without data loss. The data must remain valid between invocations of the application and rebooting the system. Files located under /var/cache may be expired in an application specific manner, by the system administrator, or both. The application must always be able to recover from manual deletion of these files (generally because of a disk space shortage). No other requirements are made on the data format of the cache directories. apt only uses /var/cache, which the *system* is expected to preserve across reboots. If apt isn't able to recreate these directories at runtime, that's an apt bug, yes; but if you don't preserve /var/cache across reboots, that's arguably a bug in your configuration, since /var/cache is supposed to be preserved just as /var/lib in the default case. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
