GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 351447
Add option to re-create temp/swap dirs every time gimp starts
Last modified: 2008-01-15 13:10:47 UTC
GIMP can't cope with temp and swap dirs being set to, say, /tmp/$username/gimp-2.2/, as it expects those dirs to exist prior to being run. This is not a reasonable assumption for /tmp, as most systems are setup to purge /tmp on boots. This normally gets hidden by the fact that installer creates them under $HOME, but there's no reason for GIMP not to be able to keep its temporary stuff under /tmp. The root of the problem here is that GIMP treats them as resource dirs, whilst in fact they are not resources of any kinds and it doesn't care about continuity between runs in any way. Expected results: - GIMP checks for existence of temp and swap dirs and mkdir -p's them if needed.
Changing the title to something that hopefully describes the real issue a bit better. Some operating systems/distributions do not offer the choice to leave some stuff in /tmp: that directory may be on a separate filesystem that is re-created at every boot. If a user wants to put the gimp temp/swap dirs in a subdir of /tmp in order to avoid running out of disk space in /home, then currently gimp complains if these directories do not exist. A solution would be to add an option that allows the user to decide if the temp/swap dirs should be created if they do not exist. The creation of directories is currently done only during the user_install step because doing it at every start could cause other problems if the user has messed up the preferences. But for temp and swap, this could be a useful option.
There is another situation in which such an option could be useful: a user with a NFS-mounted $HOME directory with limited quota or limited total disk space may be able to use a local directory on some machines for temporary storage. In that case, the user could keep her gimp profile and preferences in $HOME but have temp/swap pointing to a local directory such as /tmp, /var/tmp, /local or some other location. That temporary directory may not be available anymore if the user moves to a different machine or if the directory is periodically cleaned up. It would be nice if GIMP could re-create it whenever necessary.
This has long been fixed in the development branch. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 172682 ***