[arch-general] How to disable systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer

[LANGLOIS Olivier PIS -EXT]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arch-general [mailto:arch-general-bounces at archlinux.org] On Behalf
> Of Lukas Jirkovsky
> Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2014 3:54 AM
>
> Please don't start another systemd flamewar. And BTW, automatic /tmp
> cleaning was there since the beginning.

I agree to not start a flamewar but hopefully systemd devs do not consider their SW as perfect and are looking to improve it by taking into consideration the userbase complains about it.

Maybe automatic /tmp cleaning was there since the beginning but it appears that it never worked on my systems until very recently after using ArchLinux for over 2 years.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arch-general [mailto:arch-general-bounces at archlinux.org] On Behalf
> Of Paul Gideon Dann
> Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2014 5:26 AM
>
> On Thursday 08 May 2014 09:53:41 Lukas Jirkovsky wrote:
> > On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 9:46 AM, Christos Nouskas <nous at archlinux.us>
> wrote:
> > > On 8 May 2014 09:43, Olivier Langlois <olivier at olivierlanglois.net> wrote:
> > >> Since a recent update (I have first noticed a couple of weeks ago
> > >> this new systemd enhancement), systemd started to automatically
> > >> clean /tmp directory daily. This is not something that I like as I
> > >> prefer to decide when to clean up and to manually perform the clean
> up.
>
> The /tmp directory is intended for temporary files, after all. If you need them
> to stick around, I'd recommend using /var/tmp. But yeah, masking the unit
> file should solve this for you, I think.

I was forecasting that this comment would come when I wrote the original request. While I agree with what you say, I think that it is reasonable to let the user have the control over when it is cleaned. Without denaturing the /tmp folder, I'm using it to experiment patches on some packages or launch computation and store results into /tmp to return back at them the next morning. I have been a bit shocked to find out one morning that my files have been deleted by my system. IMHO, this goes against the rule of least surprise which is a pillar of the unix philosophy.

I understand that for some sysadmins it might be convenient to have an automatic cleanup but IMHO they should explicitly set it up. I am not too sure that this is a good default behavior.

That being said, I'll try to mask the service. Thank you very much for your replies.

Greetings,
Olivier

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