On Wed, Jan 19, 2022 at 11:48 AM Chris Adams <linux(a)cmadams.net> wrote:
This push to destroy /var really needs to be stopped, or at least
handled as a whole and not on a piecemeal basis. There are many
packages that store data and config in /var that is NOT to be deleted at
will. The big thing is databases, but there are lots of little things.
No one is envisioning non-obvious or automatic factory resets as a
matter of course.
Firefox keeps a bunch of databases ~/.mozilla/firefox. Were it true
that deleting any of these databases resulted in Firefox crashing, or
otherwise being non-functional, that would be a bug. It is also true
that deleting these databases, or the entire user profile, constitutes
data loss. That it is data loss doesn't absolve an application from
misbehaving, rather than reverting to a default but functional state.
For example, snmpd stores program-generated config in
/var/lib/net-snmp,
which gets merged with config from /etc/snmp.
What's the exact consequence of deleting either /etc/snmp and
/var/lib/net-snmp - separately and together?
If there's program-generated config in /var/lib/net-snmp, why can't it
regenerate it when its missing?
--
Chris Murphy