[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Re: Moving /var/run to a tmpfs?

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Sat, Sep 16, 2006 at 06:54:05PM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> Hello,
> It has been pointed out to me in  http://bugs.debian.org/387699
> that syvinit is going to move /var/run to a tmpfs to solve a long-standing
> issue, having some place to store state information before partitions
> are checked and mounted. (I do not know how they are going to handle
> the fact that /var/run is needed before /var is mounted, mount --move
> requires kernel 2.6 afaict.)
> 
> This is nice, but is going to break packages that either ship a
> subdirectory of /var/run in the deb or generate it once in
> postinst and rely on its existence afterwards.
> 
> Contents*gz and therefore packages.d.o do not list (empty) directories
> but only files, so I cannot yet say how many packages this is actually
> going to break, I have listed those I found on my system in the
> bug-report noted above.

Afaik, Ubuntu is already using this.  As a result, I've actually got a
bug against my package submitted because it didn't handle it.   My
package now recreates the directory from the init script if it's
missing, and I'm not really happy about that solution.

I'm not really sure what the right thing to do is.  Maybe the FHS should
be made clear on what you can expect from /var/run.

I guess it would be useful to know what people now put in there.  I know
some daemons just want to have empty directory they can chroot to.
Maybe they should put that somewhere else?  I have no idea what others
are putting there.

Anyway, it would be useful if you didn't have to login on merkel to be
able to see your list.  I suggest you either submit those files to the
BTS, or put it on people.debian.org or something.


Kurt