A deep dive into Debian 13 /tmp: What's new, and what to do if you don't like it

But the auto-cleanup feature looks awful to me. Be it desktop or servers, machine with uptime of more than a year, I never saw the case of tmp being filled just by forgotten garbage. Only sometimes filled by unzipping a too big file or something like that. But it is on the spot.

It used to be the place where you could store cache or other things like that that will hold until next reboot. It looks so arbitrary and source of random unexpected bugs to have files being automatically deleted there after random time.

I don't know where this feature comes from, but when stupid risky things like this are coming, I would easily bet that it is again a systemd "I know best what is good for you" broken feature shoved through our throats...

And if coming from systemd, expect that one day it will accidentally delete important filed from you, something like following symlinks to your home dir or your nvme EFI partition...

It might have more to do with the type of developers I've worked with, but it happens all the time. Monitoring complains and you go into check, and there it is gigabytes of junk dumped there by shitty software or scripts that can't cleanup after themselves.

The issue is that you don't always knows what's safe to delete, if you're the operations person, and not the developer. Periodically auto-cleaning /tmp is going to do break stuff, and it will be easier to demand that the operations team disable auto-cleanup than getting the issue fixed in the developers next sprint.