On Fri, 20 Feb 2026 at 12:22:38 +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
While we are at it, I wonder if we could actually deprecate those
locations for forky, and what would be the steps for doing so.
Which meaning of deprecated do you have in mind: the one where we
discourage its use but it continues to work indefinitely, or the one
where we plan to make it stop working? For /var/run, I think the first
would be fine but the second would not.
/var/run is required by FHS 3.0, and paths below /var/run are part of
interoperable cross-distro specifications from before /run was invented
(at least D-Bus, and probably others) so it's something that should
continue to exist essentially forever, similar to /bin -> usr/bin
continuing to exist after merged /usr so that /bin/sh still works. We
can discourage accessing it via that name and encourage accessing it via
/run (for example systemd already logs warnings if a systemd unit refers
to /var/run) but fully removing it would be an interoperability break,
not just between old Debian and new Debian but also between non-Debian
and new Debian.
I've requested that the next FHS version should require /run and
/var/run to be equivalent (in practice via a symlink or bind-mount or
similar), originally in
<https://web.archive.org/web/20250123180623if_/https://bugs.linuxfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1382>
and subsequently moved to
<https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/FHS/fhs-spec/-/issues/49>, and there
doesn't seem to have been any opposition to that.
I suspect there are similar considerations for /var/lock, but I don't
maintain anything that interacts with that directory, so I don't know
the finer details of its history and uses.
smcv
