Bug#904079: systemd: tmpfiles: cleaning up /tmp at boot breaks things

[Arnaud Rebillout]

> In this case console-setup just needs to add the proper After= directive.
> Why this hasn't happened yet is unclear to me. Please poke the
> console-setup maintainer about this.

Done, thanks for the quick reply.

> /tmp has been traditionally cleaned up during (early) boot in Debian.
> This has always been the case (alredy under sysvinit)
> Services which run during early boot need to make sure to explicitly
> specify the orderings and dependencies.

Just my two cents: I find this behavior a bit fragile. It means that an
application can't reliably use /tmp during boot time.

How do we know which application needs to create a temporary file when
they're started? This is internal to the implementation, we can't really
make any assumption on that. To be on the safe-side, then we should
ensure that every service runs after tmpfiles cleaned up /tmp.

How many services do that at the moment? Let me have a look on my machine:

$ grep -rn 'After=systemd-tmpfiles' /lib/systemd/
/lib/systemd/system/rpcbind.service:4:After=systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service

Only one on my machine, that's not much. It makes me wonder how many
services out there, like console-setup, use /tmp at boot time, without
knowing that there's a risk that systemd-tmpfiles break them.

  Arnaud