Re: Cleaning of $XDG_CACHE_HOME and $XDG_CACHE_HOME/thumbnails
- From: Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>
- To: Benjamin Berg <benjamin sipsolutions net>, xdg lists freedesktop org
- Cc: gnomecc-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: Cleaning of $XDG_CACHE_HOME and $XDG_CACHE_HOME/thumbnails
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2020 15:14:32 +0100
On Wed, 2020-02-26 at 14:30 +0100, Benjamin Berg wrote:
On Wed, 2020-02-26 at 14:22 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
On Wed, 2020-02-26 at 13:45 +0100, Benjamin Berg wrote:
Now, systemd-tempfiles can already clean up everything except for
the
trash. And considering that $XDG_CACHE_HOME is non-essential by
definition, I think it might be sane to use systemd-tempfiles not
only
to clean the thumbnails but the entirety of $XDG_CACHE_HOME in
the
future.
It's not "non-essential", it's a cache, which can be regenerated,
but
it might be utterly costly to do so. Eg. there are 10 gigs of
"cached"
evolution mails in my ~/.cache, 5 gigs of jhbuild builddirs.
Nuking it is a last ditch scenario. You'd avoid backing it up on
space
constrained storage, but you'd want to avoid having to regenerate
that
cache in most cases.
I am *not* proposing to nuke these directories. I am proposing to
nuke
them by default, and ask applications like evolution, jhbuild and
others to ship their own configuration.
This matches the behaviour of /tmp and /var/tmp on systemd managed
systems. In the simplest case, all evolution needs to do is ship a
one
line file with:
x %C/evolution
This file can even be installed to the users $XDG_CONFIG_DIR for
applications that might not be able to do it globally.
That sounds like a recipe for disaster, if you have an older version of
evolution and a newer version of the host OS.
Flatpak'ed applications also use a different cache directory, like:
$ export | grep CACHE
declare -x XDG_CACHE_HOME="/home/hadess/.var/app/<app-id>/cache"
I'd say that it might better left well alone, and have something like
Baobab better signal what each directory is/which application it
belongs to, to clean it up.
<snip>
Is it reasonable to standardise on the systemd tmpfiles.d format?
Is it OK to clean $XDG_CACHE_HOME after a fixed time period by
default?
I'm guessing that's a no.
As for thumbnails, you'd probably get away with checking whether
atime
is actually set on that mount and cleaning up the ones that haven't
been used.
Benjamin
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