What @bluca says is mostly true and valid. But it is how things should be, not how things actually are, and getting from the latter to the former is easier said than done. E.g. with Xorg it *might* be straightforward to fix the server and simple clients (i.e. those that just call XOpenDisplay). But some clients may wish to do something "fancier", and then there are tools and utilities that may not actually open the display; those all will still expect to find the files under /tmp/.
WRT first at boot vs. replaced later: not quite the same. Programs can and do make sanity checks at startup, refusing to proceed if the owner/permissions are wrong. Not many check at runtime with each usage of the files. Also, this is precisely the purpose of /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/x11.conf: to ensure correct ownership and permissions; too bad it does not also have rules to prevent removal of the dirs/files. The problem seems to be that in the olden days, /tmp *was* the (world- writable) runtime directory, and that's why it was used as such e.g. by X11 and that legacy practice still continues today (Filesystem Hierarchy Standard v1.0 is from 1994; that is old, but not as old as X11). Also had a thought: I don't know if it was actually codified in any way, but dotfiles directly under /tmp and /var/tmp *may* have been de-facto protected from runtime removal. Either explicitly, or because the cleanup tools (of the time) just did globs of /tmp/* and /var/tmp/* for removal candidates. Adding a tmpfiles rule that achieves this protection might be worth consideration. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2088268 Title: systemd /tmp cleaning removes files that it shouldn't To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/2088268/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
