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

[Andreas Henriksson]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 10:51:14AM +0700, Arnaud Rebillout wrote:
[...]
> 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.

You are over generalizing since you forgot to account for this
particular line/setting:
https://sources.debian.org/src/console-setup/1.184/debian/console-setup-linux.console-setup.service/#L3

HTH

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson