Bugzilla – Bug 150871
Useful to have per-user /tmp equivalent -- for volatile files that can be recreated
Last modified: 2006-09-01 10:46:37 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.
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.
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...
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.
Marcus, could you comment on this, please?
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?
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.
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.