In some email I received from John F. Woods, sie wrote:
> 
> > I prefer to think of /scratch not being backed up but persisting across
> > reboots.  Most other sites I know of which support a "/scratch" have used
> > this philosophy.
> >As far as I'm concerned, NetBSD should _NOT_ have touched it.
> 
> "I prefer to think of /bin as being a bin where I can throw random stuff.
> NetBSD should _NOT_ be trying to find programs there!"  (Hmm, would /usr/bin
> be where I throw random users?)
[...]
> Personally, I've always used "/stuff" for persistent "stuff", and see no
> semantic trouble in treating a /scratch partition like a "scratch tape"...
[...]

And how'd you feel about NetBSD deciding that /stuff was to be pruned daily ?

Someone else pointed out to me earlier that /scratch cleaning is inherited
from 4.4BSD.  FreeBSD at least has done away with it or doesn't scrub NFS
partitions.

I'd be a little less outraged if /scratch had of been mounted locally, BUT
it wasn't.

Anyway, I think this debate is likely to get down to personal choice and
preferences if it goes on as above for much longer.

So, to summarise:

1. NetBSD currently prunes /scratch daily;
2. this action is undocumented;
3. this action is not restricted to local disks;
4. even if it were in heir(7), oddities (and I'll call it that because I've
   never come across another OS which worked this way) should be disabled
   by default (IMHO).

I think someone should address (2) and (3) - I'm not the only one who has
lost "stuff" this way and it will happen again, I'm sure :-)

darren