Re: stdio.h's P_tmpdir definition - make it /tmp?

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost> writes:

> On Fri, Aug 30, 2019 at 02:40:06PM +1000, matthew green wrote:
>> hi folks.
>> 
>> 
>> a very long time ago in netbsd years tls@ patched GCC to use
>> /tmp over /var/tmp, for the compiler temporaries.
>> 
>> i tried to keep these patches, but they got lost at some
>> point and when i recently wanted to deal with it (i had one
>> machine with some several hundred /var/tmp/cc*.o files that
>> were mostly over a year old), i discovered it's not nearly
>> as simple as a quick patch.
>> 
>> most of the toolchain consumers that create temp files don't
>> use $TMPDIR from the env but use stdio.h's P_tmpdir defintion
>
>
> Well, this is... well... I'm embarassed I missed it.  I think
> you should change it now.
>
> Only thing to watch out for I suppose is that vi's expectation
> of where vi.recover goes doesn't change -- though that should
> never have even been in /var/tmp in the first place.

The change sounds good to me.

It seems that long long ago, /tmp was small and on /, and /var was often
bigger, and people used /var/tmp for larger stuff.   Also I remember a
notion of clearing /tmp on boot and not clearing /var/tmp.   Now, /tmp
is a tmpfs and large/fast, and the right place for things that really
belong in /tmp.  /var/tmp should probably go away, but that's harder.