Richard Lewis <richard.lewis.deb...@googlemail.com> writes: > btw, i'm not trying to argue against the change, but i dont yet > understand the rationale (which id like to be put into the > release-notes): is there perhaps something more compelling than "other > distributions and upstream already do this"?
It sounds like that is what kicked off this discussion, but moving /tmp to tmpfs also usually makes programs that use /tmp run faster. I believe that was the original motivation for tmpfs back in the day. For /var/tmp, I think the primary motivation to garbage-collect those files is that filling up /var/tmp is often quite bad for the system. It's frequently not on its own partition, but is shared with at least /var, and filling up /var can be very bad. It can result in bounced mail, unstable services, and other serious problems. Most modern desktop systems now have large enough drives that this isn't as much of a concern as it used to be, but VMs often still have quite small / partitions and put /var/tmp on that partition. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
