Michael Shapiro wrote: > From an interface perspective, no rule includes third-party software. > There is this directory. Any process can dump stuff there if it likes. > We have no control over that regardless of what rules or documents we invent. > There's nothing to say some application isn't already dumping stuff there.
I have to disagree. Nothing prevents third party applications from scribbling all over the file system, but if they do then we consider it a bug and it's the application vendor's problem when the application breaks or causes problems for the system. In this particular case, if the directory is non-public, it might go away in the next release of Solaris, or perhaps even in a patch. We might decide that it should be non-volatile, or that old files should be automatically deleted after a while, or that it should be wiped when SMF restarts. If that breaks an application, our official answer would be "you shouldn't be using undocumented interfaces". Almost none of our interface boundaries are truly enforceable. The most that we can ever do is to say that certain behaviors are supported and that other behaviors are not supported.
