[CentOS] /var/run/... being deleted :((

Wed Oct 11 19:20:02 UTC 2017
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

On 09/21/2017 08:14 AM, hw wrote:
> what keeps deleting files and directories under /var/run?  Having them 
> deleted
> is extremely annoying because after a reboot, things are suddenly 
> broken because
> services don´t start. 
You've received a lot of advice, criticism, and information from this 
original post, and I'm not going to rehash any of those things.  If 
you're not expecting it,the current CentOS 7 behavior could easily be 
jarring, to say the least.  I empathize with your situation; the release 
notes are large, dense, and it's easy to miss something that has been 
changed, like this behavior (or like the need to 'yum downgrade' a 
packge to get a 'yum update' to complete).

However, whether we like it or not, CentOS is a rebuild of the sources 
for the upstream enterprise Linux.  The underlying issue is one of two 
different package maintainers having differing ideas (as well as two 
differing interpretations of admittedly ambiguous standards) of what the 
system should do.  If I see two reasonable, competent, system 
administrators disagreeing about the interpretation of a standard, then 
the standard is ambiguous.  Now, I'm not going to pass judgment on 
whether it's a bug or a feature, nor am I going to say which I think it 
is, because what I think or feel about it won't change the reality of 
the situation; this distribution is way too far down the development 
curve now -- the time to express those opinions where such expression 
might have made a difference in the reality of the situtaion was back 
while the change was being considered for Fedora, and that was a long 
time ago.

The fact of the matter is that the EL7 behavior is to store /var/run in 
a temporary way, and that's not at all likely to be changed in EL7, 
regardless of the opinions I have or express about it or what expletives 
I choose to call it.  EL7 includes mechanisms so that files, 
directories, sockets, named pipes, or whatever that need to look like 
they persisted across a reboot in /var/run can be recreated at boot as 
needed, and the packages you use do not yet use that mechanism.

If the maintainers of packages that want to run well on CentOS 7 need to 
have /var/run/$some-file persistence (or pseudo-persistence, which is 
the current behavior enabled by re-creating said files) then those 
maintainers will need to change their packages to match actual behavior 
or file a bug report with upstream to change the behavior.  Upstream 
will probably close with a 'WONTFIX' and the package maintainer will 
either change packaging or stop supporting CentOS 7.  Of course, 
stranger things have happened, and upstream might relent on the 
decision.  But my gut feel is that upstream will keep the current 
behavior and the packages will eventually be changed to support it, but 
I always reserve the right to be wrong.