On 2016-07-29 19:19:05 +0200, David Kalnischkies wrote: > This log file has basically only one purpose: It can be attached to > bugreports so that a triager can reproduce the ordering problem a user > encounter. If the user encountered it in a simulation or not makes no > pratical difference and in fact, the subsystem involved here has no > knowledge about simulation or not for the exact same reason. It is > considerable easier to produce the same file after a simulation of > course as the state it records hasn't changed according to your requests > for real… until we realize that this could equally well be aptitude or > whatever else based on libapt where retracing your steps is slightly > harder than pressing up at the command prompt…
Then I'd say that more debugging information than log. > In so far it isn't the archetypical log file, but it seemed to fit best > in that category. I would dislike dropping such a file in /tmp or ~/ > because it doesn't belong there even if there is precedence by other > tools. Its also not for state keeping (/var/lib) and not a cache > (/var/cache) as its never read. Well, the goal of creating such a file is that it may be read. Note also that /var/cache also contains backups of cache files, which will normally not be read again. > It does log the current state of the > system through which is why I placed it in /var/log. Its not ideal that > this is root-only, but as mentioned I really don't like ~/. > > Do you have a better suggestion for a location? It seems that tools often put debugging information in /tmp. I think that one reason is that it is writable by the user. If the user's home is used, it should be in a dedicated directory. But perhaps a new location for such data should be introduced, such as /var/debug for root and perhaps ~/.cache/debug for the user (the goal of .cache seems more general than caches, and is actually for any non-essential data[*]). [*] The XDG spec says: "There is a single base directory relative to which user-specific non-essential (cached) data should be written." -- Vincent Lefèvre <vinc...@vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
