On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 08:52:16PM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Mostly I'm interested in avoiding surprises and having code that isn't married to the weirdness of any particular version of any particular distribution. And I found this to be pretty surprising, given that I
That's always difficult, as distributions all have their own quirks. We have some semblance of a standard in the LSB, but it's not strongly adhered to by any distro. For file locations in specific, there is the FHS (see http://www.linuxbase.org/betaspecs/fhs/fhs.html for latest draft), and while I think it could be a little more clear on /tmp, there are no promises of anything other than that /tmp must be available to programs — and that programs can't count on data there to be preserved. I think it's clear that /var/lib/{something} is a better match.
Of course, with some degree of irony, providing a defacto standard base across Linux distributions is, I think, one of the goals of the upstream project — and, whatever you may think of it, as measured by distribution adoption, that seems to be _more_ successful in practice than any previous standarization effort. So, with an eye to the future, "do what systemd suggests" is, really, not your worst option.
could see the file in /tmp and could read the code that was looking there. So, from the point of view of writing portable code, how should something handle this to run on any unix-like system?
Do exactly what twiki does — provide a configuration option.