Bug 69097

Summary:	systemctl start should run "systemd-tmpfiles --create" automatically
Product:	systemd	Reporter:	Pacho Ramos <pachoramos1>
Component:	general	Assignee:	systemd-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	systemd-bugs
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	radek
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Pacho Ramos 2013-09-08 12:58:26 UTC

Sometimes I see a service fails to start and, finally, it is caused by simply needing to get some files/dirs created by "systemd-tmpfiles --create". Wouldn't be possible to make systemctl start do that? Thanks a lot

Comment 1 Lennart Poettering 2013-09-09 17:26:36 UTC

Similar atomicity concerns apply here as for https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=69096 (especailly as --create can be destructive by truncating files).

Note that tmpfiles is designed to be run at boot-up (and possibly package installation time), but not each time a service is started (this is for security reasons as creating fixed name dirs in /tmp is only safe if it is done before the first user logs in).

Also, there is currently no explicit connection between tmpfiles snippets in unit files.

We generally recommend packagers to invoke tmpfiles in the postinst scripts of the package. For RPM we even provide a spec file snippet for that in %tmpfiles_create.

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