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Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var

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Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org> writes:

> Moved as suggested. Also incorporated your suggestion on the versioned
> virtual package dependency verbatim.

Okay, I felt like doing editing this evening, apparently, so even though
only you, Sam, and Simon had a chance to respond, I went ahead and did the
editing.  I'm guessing we still have some discussion to get through, but
attached is a revised diff that I think captures the content of your diff
but adds some additional explanation and justification that I was kind of
craving.  Please let me know if I messed up any of the meaning here.

Note that this adds a must (held over from Luca's "required") for init
systems.  I don't want to introduce that into Policy until the sysvinit
maintainers have had a chance to weigh in or someone can confirm that
sysvinit already handles running systemd-tmpfiles appropriately when it is
installed.

I should note that I dropped the admonition in the maintainer scripts
section to use upstream's tmpfiles.d files because admonitions of this
type (from Lintian and elsewhere) annoy me.  The maintainer is in the best
possible position to balance the advantages of using upstream
configuration that is shared across distributions, bugs in the upstream
version that aren't fixed, upstream's ability to maintain those files
directly, whether upstream accepts contributions promptly, and whether
there are Debian-specific integration concerns that need to be addressed.

Less personally and more specific to Policy, making appropriate decisions
about when to use upstream files and when to use Debian-specific files is
a maintainer experience and expertise issue, not a Policy issue.  Policy
defines how the packages should work and is agnostic about where the
pieces of it come from.  If we want to give maintainers advice on how to
integrate upstream packages, I think that should go into Developers
Reference instead.

There was some earlier discussion in this bug about the possibility of
using tmpfiles.d to manage things like /run directories that, under
sysvinit, are currently managed in a somewhat ad hoc and untrackable way,
such as via mkdir in the init script.  I still think there's something
there, but I don't see a good way to describe it without creating possible
problems, so I left it out.

> We don't have to handle it with this change/bug and as mentioned I've
> already reworded it as suggested, but to clarify my thinking there, the
> place I was coming from was the factory reset and first boot angle. When
> doing a first boot with only the OS vendor tree under /usr and nothing
> else, you want to get to a working system, and if there are complex
> files created under /var by maintainer scripts, that's kinda of a
> problem.

Should Debian decide to adopt the OS vendor tree concept, I certainly
understand how what gnubg does would interfere with that.  This seemed
like the best of a set of bad options at the time.  I may adopt Simon's
idea of just putting the generated file in /usr, which would also allow me
to drop a Debian-specific patch; I didn't do that because putting files in
/usr that dpkg doesn't know about felt icky, but Simon is correct that
there are a lot of other precedents.

> Perhaps those complex binaries should be created by oneshot services
> that run at boot with a ConditionPathExists=!/var/some/complex/binary
> other than maintainer scripts? That way if /var is blown away, you still
> get a working system on next boot.

Yes, I could also do something like that.  Of course, the point may be
moot if upstream never ports GNU Backgammon to anything newer than Gtk+ 2,
and the chances of that port currently aren't looking great.

> But again, happy to shelve this for now, as it's a more complex topic.

Agreed, we don't have to cross this bridge today.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-09-10 05:00 +0200
  Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> - 2023-09-10 12:40 +0200
    Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> - 2023-09-11 01:10 +0200
    Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-09-11 07:40 +0200
      Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-09-11 08:10 +0200
        Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org> - 2023-09-11 09:40 +0200
          Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-09-11 18:10 +0200
            Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org> - 2023-09-11 21:30 +0200
            Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-09-13 07:10 +0200
              Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-09-13 07:30 +0200
                Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> - 2023-09-13 11:20 +0200
                Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> - 2023-09-13 16:40 +0200
  Bug#945269: debian-policy: packages should use tmpfiles.d(5) to create directories below /var Edward Little <e.little598@gmail.com> - 2023-09-11 03:10 +0200

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