On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Ian Stakenvicius <a...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Realistically, software should ensure the directories it needs at > runtime are created through their own code, but upstreams are lazy and > so they don't bother because, hey, we can have this tmpfiles.d *.conf > file to have the system do it for us!
This isn't really being lazy. This is just not re-inventing the wheel. If there is a standard way to ensure that directories are set up correctly (especially if they're volatile, or you have a first-time-every-time scenario like a container) then why not use it? It certainly makes more sense than a bunch of shell code in a unit file (which then must be duplicated in an init.d script), or having the program run as root, create directories, and then drop privs. It was less of an issue when things were less volatile. However the trend in servers especially has been towards volatility. Every boot basically is the first boot. A lot more stuff ends up on a tmpfs as well. > In those cases, we'd need that rdepend. I tend to agree with this thinking. If the package needs these directories at runtime, and the tmpfiles.d config is the mechanism to create it, then the package has a runtime dependency on a program that will do what it says. That said, I'm not 100% on this as this is a bit of an unusual situation. This is generally boot-time configuration so you have a package run-time dependency on a package being there at boot time. It isn't exactly the typical sort of requirement. -- Rich
