On Wednesday, February 26, 2020 8:51 AM, Benjamin Berg wrote:
> [...] I *do* want applications to explicitly ship an opt-out file if they do
> not want any cleaning ever. And threatening with automatic clean-up is
> probably a good idea, because otherwise no one will bother.
This is simply wrongheaded. Applications should not be required to opt-out,
period, and it is reasonable for them to rely on not having to opt out. It is
moreover absolutely unacceptable to threaten people in order to obtain
compliance with an arbitrary policy, as you propose to do. It would be fine to
provide a facility for explicit opt-out, and some applications might make use
of it for extra assurance. It is probably right that most will not bother, but
that should not be regarded as a problem.
> So, I would still propose to write the requirement to ship a configuration
> file and the possibility of defaulting to clean after e.g. 30 days into the
> specification.
On the contrary. If this generalized facility is implemented then it should
provide a clear promise that only cache contents explicitly configured for
automatic cleanup will be affected, with the possible pseudo-exception that
areas that are already subject to such cleanup (e.g. thumbnails) will continue
to be cleaned up by default. I would expect the "by default" part of that to
take the form of opt-in configuration being shipped and installed by default,
presumably in $XDG_CONFIG_DIR, as opposed to the behavior being built directly
into the software.
> That does not say anything about how long the grace period for such a change
> would be. And while I personally think we should flip the default eventually,
> we could still decide to never actually do so. Or leave the decision up to
> distributions and administrators.
If it makes you feel any better, you can make the promise that opt-in is
required a weak one, so that you can imagine that it would be on the table to
flip the policy at some point in the future. In reality, however, I don't see
any reason to think that it would ever be reasonable to require opt-out under
any circumstances.
John Bollinger
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