This, in my opinion, is the correct view. If the users/admins of a system are putting files somewhere, those are their files and therefore their responsibility. It is not up to anyone else to claim they know better and clean up after them.
If the files are abandoned by applications that don't clean up after themselves, the applications should be updated to clean up properly, since only those applications understand the full context of what is or isn't still "in use" or needed (and possibly convince those applications to use their own scratch space such as /tmp/<package>/ that is more easily identifiable). Checking the documentation of those applications for descriptions of what ends up in [/var]/tmp/ would also be useful, since that informs the admin's decision on how to deal with possibly abandoned temp files. Making the applications behave properly and trusting the system owners to run their systems as they see fit will always be the better choice. Otherwise, all that will happen is that over time, another scratch space that does not automatically get reaped will appear, users and apps will migrate to that space, and we will all be back where we started. (No, they won't just "change the defaults" because that's not a stable process. One admin may allow that while another doesn't.) --J Sent from my mobile device. ________________________________ From: Philip Hands <p...@hands.com> Sent: Tuesday, May 7, 2024 06:31 This makes me wonder what it is that we're expecting to need to delete. Is this a symptom of sloppy applications that fail to clear up the debris they create in /var/tmp? If so, is that not a bug in that application? I'd suggest that rather than clearing up after the sloppy behaviour of buggy applications, we instead leave it visible, in the hope that it can then be fixed. Of course, that's obviously not worked in some (many?) cases, so where we know of problematic packages, could we not add per-package tmpfiles.d files that name the specific paths that those packages are known to litter the system with, with appropriate deletion timeouts chosen by the Maintainer? That ought to achieve the benefit you're looking for, without hiding symptoms of future problems with other packages, and without inconveniencing anyone that's using /var/tmp as scratch space. Cheers, Phil. -- Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil
