[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Re: Early-writeable partition (aka. "/run x /var/run")

[Thomas Hood]

Hi!

Good synopsis, with these caveats...


> 2.  This directory probably should not be generally available in its early
>    boot location after the equivalent of rcS.d is done with, to avoid
>    missuse.


My view is that it is possible to deal with misuse in the same way as we deal
with other bad practices: someone notices the abuse and files a bug report.

We shouldn't make our code more complicated, or remove functionality, just
because we think that this will have a *psychological* effect on our fellow
developers.


> 4.  Debian supports ephemeral /var/run (i.e. tmpfs /var/run or rm -rf'ed on
>    early boot /var/run)


That isn't really true.  The directories under /var/run are not deleted, and
some packages rely on this.


> Only two packages still ship /var/run directories inside debs.


There are certainly more than that.

$ dpkg -L $(dpkg -S /var/run | sed -e 's/,//g') | grep /var/run|sort|uniq
/var/run
/var/run/alsa
/var/run/cups
/var/run/dbus
/var/run/hal
/var/run/linuxlogo
/var/run/pppconfig
/var/run/samba
/var/run/sshd
/var/run/usb

-- 
Thomas