Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

Posted Jun 4, 2024 15:34 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by bluca
Parent article: Debian's /tmpest in a teapot

> 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