On 14.7.2010, at 22.02, Steven King wrote:
So why was the move made in the first place? Because a) some people had small (maybe ramfs) /tmp and Dovecot was eating it all up and b) to avoid any potential security issues with storing per-user files to a shared directory. I haven't seen anywhere that /tmp is actually a ramfs, but that is besides your point. I would say that if people are using Dovecot they should be designing the partitions around the need for the software and services they are running (at least that is what I do).
But there are tons of people who just use defaults, at least until they run into problems, so the default needs to be a good one. In this case I'd even say probably over 99% of Dovecot users won't change the default, and most of them not even aware of the existence of this setting..
Everywhere I have seen /var/tmp used, it has been linked to /tmp.
I don't see that in any systems I have access to right now.. FHS says /var/tmp is for temporary files that must not be removed when rebooting a machine. So if /tmp is a ramfs, /var/tmp is almost guaranteed not to be.
I would recommend using /tmp as the default. Also, not all distributions, including Slackware (which a lot of slack users like Dovecot) do use /var/tmp for anything, which can get confusing.
But /var/tmp exists, right?