[systemd-devel] [HEADSUP] /var/lock and /var/lock/lockdev

[Ludwig Nussel]

Lennart Poettering wrote:
> On Fri, 01.04.11 16:37, Ludwig Nussel (ludwig.nussel at suse.de) wrote:
> > In any case declaring some directory as the standard place for lock
> > files doesn't fully solve the problem anyways. The exact lock file
> > naming isn't quite standardized either. There's at least the FHS
> > "LCK..name" method and the SVr4 "LK.dev.maj.min" method.
> 
> I have never seen LK.x.y.z files. Documentation link?

http://www.airs.com/ian/uucp-doc/uucp_7.html#SEC86
http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/ckuins.html#x10

> It's one thing extending the base that the FHS describes in a distro,
> it's another thing dropping things that it defines, such as the
> /var/lock directory.
> 
> Now, the only improvement on the brokeness of LCK..xxx style locks we
> can pull off easily is seperating them from the other stuff that is
> stored in /var/lock. And this is usually simple (compile time switches
> in various programs), and actually implemented in Fedora.
> 
> I hope this makes some sense.

If you moving the lock files to a different place you are silently
breaking legacy applications. Sure they can still put the lock files
to /var/lock but other programs in the system just don't honor them
anymore. So as long as there are no inherently unsolvable problems
with lockdev using /var/lock directly I see no need to go the a half
solution /var/lock/lockdev. I'd rather add an rpmlint check to ban
use of /var/lock/subsys on openSUSE, there are only a few packages
using it anyways.

How many packages in Fedora that did not use lockdev already were
actually patched to use /var/lock/lockdev anyways?

cu
Ludwig

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