Roland Mainz wrote:
> Which extra "clutter" ? Right now a plain desktop user always creates
> multiple files in /tmp, for example:
So, it sounds like the desktop code could be cleaned up to not
drop turds everywhere - both in $TMPDIR and in $HOME. IMHO,
whacking only TMPDIR and not fixing the other isn't really much
of a fix...
I have to ask why your users are doing their stuff in TMPDIR
and not in $HOME? What is it about TMPDIR that they find
interesting? The reasons that come to my mind are (but
note that I am not a TMPDIE user :-)
o it may randomly be wiped out during a reboot
o it is assumed to be fast access ala ramdisk
o it isn't QUOTA'd like $HOME?
This leads me to ask why not set TMPDIR to $HOME/tmp?
Divvying up /tmp into per-user subdirs seems aimed more at
the admin than the end user, and this discussion points out
that different admins value different policies...
Josh Hurst wrote
> All desktops expose TMPDIR to the users. KDE and Enlightenment have
> bookmarks in the dialogs, Mozilla stores downloads in TMPDIR by
> default and Opera downloads files for plugins and external
> applications there. The users know about that and use TMPDIR
See above - why should /I/ care about TMPDIR - why is it interesting?
(I understand why programs find it interesting...)
I can't depend on anything (plugins, downloads, etc ) remaining there
across reboots; in most cases the apps that put things there remove
them as well; if they don't, they have a bug :-) If I *care* about
mozilla downloads, I probably should set the browser config to
download things into $HOME/somewhere. Otherwise all it is good for
is stuffing that PDF file while the browser invokes acrobat to display
it. Once I close the viewer window, the file /should/ be automatically
deleted.
On a single user system, it really doesn't matter which resources are
used for this stuff - $HOME, /tmp, ... - it's all mine anyways. But
on that shared university system, /tmp is a resource-limited shared
resource and should not be used as an extension of the per-user $HOME
disk allocation. Or, in other words, maybe the real fix here is to
fix Mozilla (etc) to default their download dirs to $HOME/Downloads :-)
-John
