Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 8:59 UTC (Tue) by dsommers (subscriber, #55274)
In reply to: Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by mathstuf
Parent article: Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Large C++ projects can easily consume a GB or more per compilation thread. I've not dug into how much of that hits the disk without -pipe. But I have seen GCC putting some work data to /tmp

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 9:22 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (10 responses)

And if someone is in the 0.x% of those cases where GBs of data are regularly written to /tmp/ without any control, they can simply configure their system accordingly. A Debian installation will not start autonomously compiling GBs of C++ intermediate data into /tmp/ by itself, if that happens it is user-driven.

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 10:19 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (9 responses)

> 0.x% of those cases

[Citation needed]

As I said in another comment, downloading an .iso file was enough to kill my entire session.

I don't think that "downloading a file to then dd on a USB device and never use it again" is a rare thing among linux users.

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 10:28 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (8 responses)

And that's why your home has a Downloads directory, which is used by browsers by default. It's completely absurd to demand that defaults should adapt to your specific use case of downloading ISOs to /tmp. Just configure your system according to your needs, it's not that hard.

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 10:49 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (7 responses)

> And that's why your home has a Downloads directory

Which is not automatically cleaned, which is why I didn't use it in that case.

> It's completely absurd to demand that defaults should adapt to your specific use case of downloading ISOs to /tmp.

It seems to me that the use case you have in mind is "do not write anything at all ever in /tmp". Do you have any source that it is the normal use case and I am indeed the only one person in the whole world that uses it?

Why not remove /tmp completely then?

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 10:51 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (6 responses)

> Which is not automatically cleaned, which is why I didn't use it in that case.

You can trivially set up a tmpfiles.d in your home that cleans it, if you want that behaviour. Or you can use /var/tmp. The possibilities are endless.

> It seems to me that the use case you have in mind is "do not write anything at all ever in /tmp".

No, this is a strawman that you have just made up.

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 15:34 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> You can trivially set up a tmpfiles.d in your home that cleans it, if you want that behaviour. Or you can use /var/tmp. The possibilities are endless.

And so is the (mis)information on the net.

What you're forgetting, is that a lot of people just want to USE their computers. And trying to find information about eg tmpfiles.d is just a nightmare of ill-informed blogs and crap documentation.

I know pretty much the minimum I need to do to administer my personal home server. One of the reasons it runs gentoo is it was a personal choice that means I need to know more than most. But finding the information I need is usually search terms that don't find what I'm looking for, search engines that assume they know better than I do what I'm looking for so they ignore critical terms, as I said, ill-informed blogs, answers that didn't read the question, etc etc.

Just because the possibilities are endless doesn't mean they are within reach of mere mortals - all too often they've disappeared up the wazoo of the infinite impossibility search engine ...

Cheers,
Wol

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 15:56 UTC (Tue) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (1 responses)

People who just want to USE their computers won't even know /tmp/ exists, because desktop applications like browsers don't use it and it doesn't show up among the desktop icons, they use ~/Download and ~/Documents and friends. If one worries about file retention policy of /tmp, then they can find out ways to configure it. Or not, find it the hard way and learn a valuable lesson in the process. The fact that this is not an issue on other distros suggests all this hair-pulling is blown-out of proportion - as the title of the article suggests.

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 17:28 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Unfortunately, they DO need to know about it ...

As someone else said, things like attachments in emails are generally stored in temp (be it c:\temp or \tmp or yada yada) and the grief I get with "I edited an attachment and saved it, where have my changes gone?"

Some people learn, unfortunately some people CAN'T learn. What's that saying? "Every time man invents something idiot-proof, nature invents a better idiot".

I get people are upset that Debian is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but it doesn't mean the 21st is any better than the 20th ...

Cheers,
Wol

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 5, 2024 5:15 UTC (Wed) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (2 responses)

> > It seems to me that the use case you have in mind is "do not write anything at all ever in /tmp".

> No, this is a strawman that you have just made up.

No need to be aggressive and condescending again Bluca.

I'm in the same situation with my home over NFS, I use /tmp *a lot*, for the same reasons. Where do I download LLMs ? Into /tmp. Where do I compile large stuff ? In /tmp as well, because it's fast (especially with SSDs these days). There are plenty of small use cases like this. I'm totally fine with uncommenting a line in /etc/fstab to preserve the old behavior though. But I think that during installation it would be reasonable to check the available RAM size and consider a size below which the user is asked whether they want /tmp as tmpfs or not, because running OOM on older systems that were once considered as "still good enough to run debian" will likely cast a bad image of that distro.

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 5, 2024 9:16 UTC (Wed) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link] (1 responses)

> No need to be aggressive and condescending again Bluca.

There is also no need to invent arguments that nobody made, and yet here we are

> I'm in the same situation with my home over NFS, I use /tmp *a lot*, for the same reasons.

NFS is not enabled by default either, so as part of your actions to setup NFS, you can also configure your tmp according to your needs

Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 5, 2024 13:37 UTC (Wed) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link]

> NFS is not enabled by default either, so as part of your actions to setup NFS, you can also configure your tmp according to your needs

Yes. But that's what he said 4 sentences after the one you quoted.