[arch-dev-public] [RFC] upcoming changes to /var/run, /var/lock and /etc/mtab

[Tom Gundersen]

Hi guys,

With the next initscripts release there will be a few changes that
should not be noticed by anyone, but I'd like to hear any feedback
from people who might know of any problems:

1) /var/run and /var/lock will be cleared on reboot

This change is implementing by making /var/{run,lock} symlinks to
/run{,lock} which are tmpfs'.

Previously, the directory structure under /var/run was preserved
(everything else was deleted). In most cases this change does not
matter, as the programs are able to recreate the needed folders on
demand. However, there are a few exceptions. All packages in core and
extra should be unaffected, and only two packages in community should
be affected (I updated https://www.archlinux.org/todo/70/ to reflect
this).

For future reference, if a package, foo, relies on /var/run/foo
existing, it should contain a file /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/foo.config:

d /run/foo 0755 root root -

2) /etc/mtab will be a symlink to /proc/self/mounts

To the best of my knowledge all users of /etc/mtab have been changed
to deal with this change, and it should work well even with cifs, nfs
and fuse.



If I hear no objections I will soon move initscripts to [testing] and
leave it in there for some time to catch any problems.

Cheers,

Tom