Thor Lancelot Simon <t...@panix.com> writes: > On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 02:40:06PM +1000, matthew green wrote: >> hi folks. >> >> >> a very long time ago in netbsd years tls@ patched GCC to use >> /tmp over /var/tmp, for the compiler temporaries. >> >> i tried to keep these patches, but they got lost at some >> point and when i recently wanted to deal with it (i had one >> machine with some several hundred /var/tmp/cc*.o files that >> were mostly over a year old), i discovered it's not nearly >> as simple as a quick patch. >> >> most of the toolchain consumers that create temp files don't >> use $TMPDIR from the env but use stdio.h's P_tmpdir defintion > > > Well, this is... well... I'm embarassed I missed it. I think > you should change it now. > > Only thing to watch out for I suppose is that vi's expectation > of where vi.recover goes doesn't change -- though that should > never have even been in /var/tmp in the first place.
The change sounds good to me. It seems that long long ago, /tmp was small and on /, and /var was often bigger, and people used /var/tmp for larger stuff. Also I remember a notion of clearing /tmp on boot and not clearing /var/tmp. Now, /tmp is a tmpfs and large/fast, and the right place for things that really belong in /tmp. /var/tmp should probably go away, but that's harder.
