Dear Russ,It's not *me* using /var/tmp for my own temporary files, it's the applications other people use. I just logged in one of the nodes we have and there were job-dependent files created by a particular, high end scientific application (which is developed by another prominent company). This is neither in mine or users' control. It's the application they use, and I bet it has no setting for that.
> If you are running a long-running task that produces data that you > care about, make a directory for it to use, whether in your home > directory, /opt, /srv, whatever.Sorry but, clusters, batch systems and other automated systems doesn't work that way.
> Not as an extension of people's home directory.That's not an extension of the home directory in any way. After users submit their jobs to the cluster, they neither have access to the execution node, nor they can pick and choose where to put their files.
These files may stay there up to a couple of weeks, and deleting everything periodically will probably corrupt the jobs of these users somehow.
I for one understand that all the folders in a UNIX system have historic reasons and customs. I prefer to stick to the traditions and specifications come with them, however when you run a big system with tons of users who use tons of applications, I can't expect every software developer under the sun to know, understand and respect that conventions.
I just wanted to highlight a very prominent scenario from my vantage point, because it's the domain I'm working in.
> Your system is your system, so of course you can configure /var/tmp > however you want and no one is going to stop you, but a lot of people > on this thread are describing habits that are going to lose their data > if they use a different distribution or even a differently-configured > Debian distribution with tmpreaper installed.Again, what I'm not describing is a *habit of mine*, but how many of the systems I interact with work, and there's no way to change that. I'm just pointing out how the systems we work with behave. We don't configure them that way. Heck, some of the applications our users use have no configuration file whatsoever.
I'm all for progress and a better, self-healing system, but I'm very against breaking things while doing that.
Cheers, H. On 7.05.2024 ÖS 5:32, Russ Allbery wrote:
Hakan Bayındır <ha...@bayindir.org> writes:Consider a long running task, which will take days or weeks (which is the norm in simulation and science domains in general). System emitted a warning after three days, that it'll delete my files in three days. My job won't be finished, and I'll be losing three days of work unless I catch that warning.I have to admit that I'm a little surprised at the number of people who are apparently using /var/tmp for things that are clearly not temporary files in the traditional UNIX sense. Clearly this bit of folk knowledge is not as widespread as I thought, so we have to figure out how to deal with that, but periodically deleting files out of /var/tmp has been common (not universal, but common) UNIX practice for at least thirty years. Whatever we do with /var/tmp retention, I beg people to stop using /var/tmp for data you're keeping for longer than a few days and care about losing. That's not what it's for, and you *will* be bitten by this someday, somewhere, because even with existing Debian configuration many people run tmpreaper or similar programs. If you are running a long-running task that produces data that you care about, make a directory for it to use, whether in your home directory, /opt, /srv, whatever. /var/tmp's primary purpose historically was to support things like temporary recovery files that needed to survive a system crash, but which were still expected to be *temporary* in that one would then either use the recovery file or expect it to be deleted. Not as an extension of people's home directory. Your system is your system, so of course you can configure /var/tmp however you want and no one is going to stop you, but a lot of people on this thread are describing habits that are going to lose their data if they use a different distribution or even a differently-configured Debian distribution with tmpreaper installed.
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