Barak A. Pearlmutter wrote:

You know, that's a pretty good idea!

Put a 00README-TMP.txt in /tmp/ and /var/tmp/ which briefly states the default deletion policy, the policy in place if it's not the default,
and a pointer to info about altering it. "/tmp's contents are deleted
at boot while /var/tmp is preserved across rebooting." Maybe in
/var/tmp suggest /var/scratch/ or /var/cache/tmp or such as a place
sysadmins might want to set up for not-backed-up but not-auto-deleted material.

If the contents aren't dynamic, maybe they could be links to files in /usr/share/doc/systemd/.

This seems like a *great* idea. systemd-tmpfiles configuration can
easily create such a file, either with contents or as a symlink to a documentation file in /usr/share/doc.

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I guess sometimes when people discuss technical matters, good ideas pop up.

(Although I still think that its problematic interactions with lengthy
suspends makes the whole idea of auto-deletion based purely on
timestamps problematic. I can imagine more coherent mechanisms, which
doesn't count time the machine was suspended against the removal
clock, which check if any files are open, check if any process has its
current directory in a tree, which treats trees as a whole instead of
deleting leaves piecemeal only deleting the tree if all its contents
are ripe, etc. That would introduce considerable complexity though.
However, it is the sort of thing a good sysadmin would do before
manually removing stuff in /var/tmp/, so ...)

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