[fhs-discuss] user-specific directories in /run

Lennart Poettering lennart at poettering.net
Sun May 22 15:26:06 PDT 2011


On Sun, 22.05.11 21:35, Roger Leigh (rleigh at codelibre.net) wrote:

> On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 09:51:12PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> > On Sun, 22.05.11 19:23, Richard Hartmann (richih.mailinglist at gmail.com) wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 18:29, Lennart Poettering
> > > <lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Look for XDG_RUNTIME_DIR.
> > > 
> > > Purrrrrfect.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > What do you think about putting that into /run, then? Assuming /run
> > > exists, that is.
> > 
> > Yes, that's where it is located by default.
> > 
> > $ echo $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR 
> > /run/user/lennart
> 
> Do we want to allow users to create files under /run, or reserve it
> solely for system use?  Right now, on Debian, it's not user-writable,
> with the exception of /run/lock (which can be a separate tmpfs mount,
> and we're looking at adding a lock group like other distros use to make
> this not globally writable) and /run/shm (which again is a separate
> tmpfs).

Dude, you want to weaken the access restrictions on /run? Uh, no! If we
did that then everybody could just go there are and create /run/dbus and
subsequently D-Bus couldn't be started anymore. 

> What makes /tmp unsuitable for this purpose?  It's already possible
> to securely create directories owned by the user there, and these
> runtime files are, by definition, temporary.

/tmp is a shared namespace. That means you have to store your stuff
under randomized names in it, which makes it very much unsuitable for
the purposed of $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, which is to be a place for sockets and
similar communication primitives (like pid files, ...)

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.


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