Samuel Sieb: > > Right. That's an example of what I meant by an application storing > > text data in a symlink. Even if they were rpm installed, the lock > > files most likely won't be owned by the rpm. I expect installed files to be owned by the RPM, but not files created by the program later on. Stephen Morris: > In my view they are showing poorly designed software, I can > understand the Thunderbird lock symlinks as Thunderbird is currently > running, but Firefox is not running and it is configured to not > continue running background tasks after closure (I think that option > is in firefox). The firefox lock is in the profile folder, but I > don't understand the purpose of the lock as its existence doesn't > stop the folder from being deleted. To me the existence of that lock > after shutdown is an indication to me that the developer was being > lazy and not properly cleaning up on normal shutdown. > I think in Firefox's case, it's more of some kind of flag that it uses only for itself, rather than anything else (not preventing something else deleting it, for instance). From my programming in binary days (when *you* are the compiler) it's like storing things in registers. However, I also wonder if this is the best way of doing it. Storing transitory data for an application that may well crash (browsers aren't known for stability and good programming practices) as any kind of file on disk is asking for trouble. Unless, at start up they look for these things and do clean-up housekeeping. Which, rather obviously, they don't when you're able to find such leftovers after the fact. Permanent, on-going, data stored that way is another matter. Or, where one program has to communicate data with another. But that should probably some volatile storage, instead. And there are other systems for piping data between apps than storing some kind of file (I'm lumping symlinks in with that, here). I suppose the big question is how much of a problem are they? On a storage system with limited nodes and lots of applications that might be doing the same thing, perhaps. On a user's system who never does fresh installs, and has being doing over-the-top updates for the last 15 years, perhaps even more so. Although these will hardly be the only leftover files that accumulate in the background. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
