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Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by akira2501 on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @05:30PM (#40579152)
It's my bin. I paid a lot of money for it. I can keep my keys in it if I want and if it's convenient for me. I don't work for the council and I don't care what their agenda is.

Why not just have the installer _ask_ me what configuration I prefer? Is there some reason you have to force the change, announce a victory, then make me to go mucking with "defaults" after the fact?

Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by chuckadams on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @05:42PM (#40579248)
You can already change the configuration in the installer, it's called manual partition setup. The installer doesn't need a clicky screen for every setting that may have changed over the last 30 years.
Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by akira2501 on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @06:33PM (#40579641)
So if I do the manual partition setup it's not going to run the daemon that automatically deletes files off those partitions during runtime for me? It sounded from the article like this change is more comprehensive than just the partition.
Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by chuckadams on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @06:52PM (#40579762)
I doubt it'll change the auto-cleanup. It probably is configurable with dpkg-reconfigure, or maybe it's just a service that needs to be disabled. Post-installation configuration is still a thing, and it changes every version. That's what versions are for.
Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by cbsks on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @10:44PM (#40580910)
It’s a systemd service: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/tmpf...

You will have to disable it separately. From the article:

“To stop periodic cleanups of /tmp and /var/tmp users can run touch /etc/tmpfiles.d/tmp.conf.”

Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by lolc on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @06:47PM (#40579729)
Eh I've lost files because I was working in a ramdisked /tmp when the computer lost power. That's what one gets when working in a dir called "tmp".

Some people will see their stuff vanish from /var/tmp and that will be their day of learning. I guess they won't have a backup of files in there either. They were one misfire away from loss anyway.

Sure it feels different when the distro just ran over your misconceptions. On the other hand, when I encounter a stray tmp dir, I assume everything in it can be deleted with negligible consequences. So I tend to rm them without even a glance inside.

Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by vrighter on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @09:38PM (#40580621)
yeah but if that's the case, it's on you not to take the bin out on trash day.
Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by KennyBlanken on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @10:30PM (#40580851)
Because that increases complexity, and introduces new ways the installer can do something unexpected or fail. There's overhead to code; it has maintenance costs.

If half a dozen people in your town of 10,000 use bins for storing soup, but one year the council procures bins with holes in the bottom to keep rain from collecting in them (making them hard to move, and also providing stagnant water for mosquitoes, ie something that benefits nearly everyone)...

...what would be your opinion of a blitzkrieg of online and media criticism of the council for not considering the needs of soup binners...by people who do not store soup in their bins but are screeching about the needs of the people who do and they say will be affected by the change?

And then someone on the council has said "alright, fine, look...I doubt there's that many of these people. I'll go talk to them, who are they?" and the screechers admit they don't actually know any soup binners, so the councilmember looks them up and goes to the house of every soup binner and either plug the holes in their bin for them, gives them proper soup pots, or prints out a list of soup pots they can find on amazon...or finds out that they say "well gosh I had a soup pot in the attic but I never got around to using it, I'll just switch. Thank you for the heads up that the new bins will have holes in the bottom."

Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by immibis on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @10:51PM (#40580940)
> Why not just have the installer _ask_ me what configuration I prefer? Is there some reason you have to force the change, announce a victory, then make me to go mucking with "defaults" after the fact?

It's the Poettering way. And GNOME, for some reason.

Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by akira2501 on Wednesday June 05, 2024 @05:41AM (#40583078)
It's a recent part of our culture to look down on the "uninitiated" and treat them with extreme infantilizing pity almost bordering on actual bullying. I call it the "temporarily embarrassed future nobel prize winner mindset."

I put it down to the level of monopolization of industry and to a certain extent our culture. These people mean well and they're mostly just reacting to a really baffling labor market in the face of a failed and entirely captured internet revolution.

With the right pair of eyes you can look across the dunes of github into the early 2000s and see where open source culture peaked, crashed, and rolled back.

Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by immibis on Wednesday June 05, 2024 @07:39AM (#40583719)
I had the chance to speak with a GNOME developer about this. Apparently GNOME is trying to be the little old lady desktop that's intuitive for grandma. Which is fine - if it's marketed as that, and not put on the same level as KDE or even tiling WMs, and not trying to influence the entire ecosystem.
Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by guappa on Wednesday June 05, 2024 @08:15AM (#40583949)
My retired mother uses KDE.
Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by blucaz on Wednesday June 05, 2024 @05:32AM (#40583025)
> Why not just have the installer _ask_ me what configuration I prefer?

Because nobody bothered to actually put in some work to implement that. As I've said on the ML, if somebody does the work, I'll review it. But it's one of hundreds of different settings, and it's obviously not worth anybody's time to do this work, as it's largely inconsequential and trivial to configure via the supported config files. Complaining on social media is of course cheap enough that we get plenty of it.

Re:Debian's /tmpest in a teapot by Macha on Wednesday June 05, 2024 @06:53AM (#40583483)
Here the council* provides the bins that they collect on rubbish day. If you want to provide your own bin they'll leave it alone, if you leave the council bin there on rubbish day they'll take the contents away.

Likewise if you make /akirastmp, the OS will leave it alone, but using the directories the OS clearly makes temporary for things that aren't should be the configuration to require manual setup since it's the unusual one.

(* Council's licensed private operators)