Moving pid files from /var/run/$name.pid to /var/run/$name/$name.pid

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

Today I received a bug report to mv sensorsd's pid file from /var/run/sensorsd.pid to
/var/run/sensorsd/sensorsd.pid, see:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=851428

As discussed there, I think / guess that the same request has probably been made
for other daemons and I'm not sure if that is a good idea, because:

/var/run/$name.pid is the standard pid file location for daemons and has been so
for ages. A lot of distros depend on this, and we used to depend on it until we
moved to systemd which no longer cares about pid files. Let me quote a snippet
from /etc/init.d/functions

# Set $pid to pids from /var/run* for {program}.  $pid should be declared
# local in the caller.
# Returns LSB exit code for the 'status' action.
__pids_var_run() {
         local base=${1##*/}
         local pid_file=${2:-/var/run/$base.pid}

Making the requested change means making changes to the daemon C-code, and if we
then upstream these changes, they will cause issues for other distro's.  So I think
that upstreaming the necessary changes is going to be a problem.

Regards,

Hans