What's this /run directory doing on my system and where does it come from?

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 05:02:43PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Wed, 30.03.11 13:54, Lennart Poettering (mzerqung at 0pointer.de) wrote:
> > With this upload Fedora and Suse have already adopted /run now. Debian
> > folks will suggest this for their coming release. Ubuntu has agreed with
> > introducing /run as well.
> 
> I guess I need to clarify this. Ubuntu actually hasn't agreed on
> anything.
> 
> Scott Remnant, the maintainer of Upstart wants /run. Scott does not work
> for Canonical anymore, but he's still involved Ubuntu, and Ubuntu uses
> Upstart where /run needs to be created.
> 
> So, I'd like to corect my self: "Ubuntu has agreed" to "To me it appears
> that they will do it".

If you need somebody who works on Ubuntu for Canonical to support this,
I'm happy to be such a person.  Supporting /var/run reliably in early
boot has long been an irritant and requires at least one hack in our
installer, and while /dev/.initramfs is functional it isn't exactly
pretty.

Certainly, we should be conservative when introducing new top-level
directories, but not to the point of obstinacy in the face of genuine
problems.  /run makes sense, it already has quite widespread agreement,
it feels Unixy, and migration will be straightforward with the aid of a
few symlinks.  I should probably not try to cram this into Ubuntu 11.04
now, but I'm happy to make this happen in Ubuntu 11.10.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]