aitor said on Tue, 16 Sep 2025 16:47:04 +0200 >Hi Steve, > >On 16/9/25 3:43, Steve Litt wrote: >> So where do all of you think the logs belong for a runsvdir run as a >> normal user (slitt in this case)? > >The drawback of using /home is that it may be mounted over network >filesystems. > >I'm aware that you haven't great sympathy for the hipsters of >freedesktop, but there is a directory used by the different user >services that need a place for their lock files, pid files, log files >and sockets. > >https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest > >According to the specifications: > >"There is a single base directory relative to which > user-specific runtime files and other file objects should > be placed. This directory is defined by the environment > variable|$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR"|
Thanks Aitor! I just echoed XDG_RUNTIME_DIR on my Void Linux machine and got no output. So $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR might be a great alternative for freedesktopy distros, but it's not universal. >I thought that "/run/user/$UID" was created by pam-systemd, but this >directory already exists in my devuan system. My Void Linux system has /run/user already, and it would be simple to create a /run/user/slitt directory that's owned by slitt. Below that I could have /run/user/slitt/fetchmail, /run/user/slitt/pulseaudio, /run/user/slitt/pager, etc. This would certainly work and is certainly reasonable, always assuming /run is on a partition big enough to accommodate growing log files. >Prior to it, user >services typically stored their files in /tmp. Maybe they considered >it inappropriate as it's writable by everyone. /tmp doesn't work because it's often a tmpfs "filesystem", in which case all your logs disappear upon reboot. And even if /tmp is a real disk partition, it's often not big enough to accommodate lots of log files. And yes, it's writeable by anybody, and in certain cases a badguy could delete log files or modify them. As more and more people write me with suggestions, it seems to me that the answer is "it depends". From my perspective, the first question to be answered is whether I want my logs to be in the same tree as my data, and backed up with my data. In my case, the answer is "no". So, like some people have pointed out, I personally am not going to have my logs anywhere in the /home tree. Somebody suggested putting it in the /var/log/slitt/fetchmail, etc, with the proper directory ownership and permissions. This is certainly an expected place, very similar to /run/user/slitt/fetchmail, except that /var/log is where log files are expected, so it's presumably sized for them and easy to remember and find. If I person *does* consider the logs data, then something in /home is certainly a great idea. Djb's putting them under $servicedir/fetchmail/log/logs has a nice expectancy to it. And of course, a whole different school of thought is that you should just feed the logs to whatever logging system is running on the computer, which has the advantage of showing this daemon's events in time context with other events, and the disadvantage of having this daemon's events scattered and hard to find. In my documentation I think I'll need to discuss that this is a decision based on the situation. In my particular use case, I don't want these logs backed up at all, so I might end up putting them under my /scratch tree, which specifically does not get backed up. I really value all the opinions you and everyone else is giving me. Based on the responses, I think there's no one-size-fits-all right answer, and that's something I wouldn't have realized if not for yours and other peoples' input. Thanks, SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com
