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. -- Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> Fedora Project Leader