pam-tmpdir promote to main?

John Moser john.r.moser at gmail.com
Wed Oct 17 14:19:58 UTC 2012


Can we promote pam-tmpdir to main instead of universe for 13.04?  It
seems to work pretty well now, and so I recommend activating it by
default early in the development cycle.  Very early.  Like first
change early:  pam-tmpdir is part of the base system default install.

The rationale for this is pam-tmpdir makes changes to $TMP and $TMPDIR
which affect application behavior.  Non-conforming applications will
dump their temp files into /tmp anyway; conforming applications using
$TMP or $TMPDIR will put them in a user-specific directory.  SOME
applications may break--they shouldn't, but GDM broke in 2004 so I
could see things breaking.

Applications ceasing to function is what I'm interested in.  Anything
that's built and tested that fails to run properly under pam-tmpdir.

pam-tmpdir creates a root-owned directory /tmp/users with permissions
o=--x.  Upon log-on, pam creates a directory /tmp/users/$UID/ owned by
the user and with permissions 700. That becomes $TMP and $TMPDIR, and
so most applications put their temporary files there.




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