Hi, On 2024-05-07 09:43, Russ Allbery wrote: > I understand your point, which is that this pattern is out there in the > wild and Debian is in danger of breaking existing usage patterns by > matching the defaults of other distributions. This is a valid point, and > I appreciate you making it.
The more general point being that if systems have certain properties, whether by design or by accident, people tend to rely on them if these properties are useful for whatever reasons. In the specific case of /var/tmp in Debian, for a very long time now the properties have been: (1) persistent, world-writable storage (2) outside of /home (3) available by default on all systems without any configuration. To many, these properties make for a good place where transient-ish work can be done without the risk of losing it upon reboot (or power loss, or similar). Not being in /home is an important one, because for instance /home may be regularly backed up, or it may be on a NFS share, or who knows what else, and you may not want that who knows why. All of that being said, I do see the value in uniformity with other distros, also because it surely makes things easier for maintainers. And yes, https://xkcd.com/1172/. It's just that changes are usually a costs/benefits tradeoff -- in the xkcd a CPU is overheating, whereas in this case the problem to fix seems a bit less obvious.
