Bug 150871

Summary:	Useful to have per-user /tmp equivalent -- for volatile files that can be recreated
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 10.2	Reporter:	Bryce Nesbitt <bryce2>
Component:	Basesystem	Assignee:	Andreas Jaeger <aj>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Enhancement
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	andreas.hanke, security-team, suse-beta
Version:	Alpha 1
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Other
URL:	http://www.obviously.com/
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Other	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Bryce Nesbitt 2006-02-14 17:15:45 UTC

There are four major categories of files on my drive:
  1) Personal.
  2) Cache (thumbnails, mozilla web page cache, imap cache)
  3) System files I've never modified.
  4) Log files, or history entries.

I can skip backing up #2 and #3, and in many cases #4 -- but it can be hard to
indentify what's what. Beagle blurs the line even more.

It would be great to have some equivalent of /tmp in userspace which contains files that don't need backing up (because they can be recreated on demand).  The huge caches of mozilla, evolution, beagle, gimp, .thumbnails, gaim, .y2log-47, IDEA, ooo, Acrobat.  All are clutter on a backup device.

Maybe:

   .cache/RealPlayer
   .cache/mozilla/firefox/23232slt/
   .cache/evolution
   .cache/beagle
   .cache/yast

SUSE could encourage package writers to adop a simple convention like this.

Comment 1 Michael Gross 2006-02-15 14:24:18 UTC

This would involve a lot of people. If you create backups, you can always set filter options (skip a directory and so on). Doing this with the mentioned caches only will not be sufficient, the problem would only be diminished in a slight degree. Furthermore, these directory trees are sometimes subject to standardization (like LSB).

Andreas: Please provide a comment or descision here.

Comment 2 Andreas Jaeger 2006-02-15 14:42:47 UTC

This is something that should have been discussed on the fhs list but those are practically dead now.

Let me think about this after 10.1 again...

Comment 3 Bryce Nesbitt 2006-02-15 15:37:37 UTC

This is something that's also subject to unilateral action.  SUSE could, for example, configure mozilla to place the per-user web page cache in ~/.cache/mozilla.  That would be a good thing in itself (making it much easier to back up the very important .mozilla directory).  And help set a pattern.

Of course I can set filter options, and I do.  But sorting that all out is time consuming.  Even just figuring out what is cache is a bunch of work.  Lots of things I use only occasionally build caches -- for example thumbnails.  These caches are even easier to miss.

Comment 4 Andreas Jaeger 2006-07-12 09:45:40 UTC

Marcus, could you comment on this, please?

Comment 5 Marcus Meissner 2006-07-12 09:54:58 UTC

its all per user stuff, so not much security interest. Nice idea
though.

KDE does it right by using /var/tmp/kdecache- and similar already btw.

Or do you want the ~/.cache/ directory link /tmp/somewzhere?

Comment 6 Bryce Nesbitt 2006-07-13 05:16:26 UTC

What's important is the convention... so authors start to sort their files in to persistent & cache categories.  /tmp/.cache_username would work.  There are already utilities that monitor /tmp and clear things out, and that would be a bonus so people don't run into a problem when the caches get too big.

Comment 7 Andreas Jaeger 2006-09-01 10:46:37 UTC

I suggest to discuss this on the opensuse-packagers mailing list and if there's consensus, then start changing packages in the buildservice - and let's test them.

For now I don't want to take any action from our side.