> The essence of the problem is that there's no standard pathname for a personal directory that's guaranteed to be on local disk, even if $HOME isn't. Consequently, people have relied on /var/tmp/$USER for this. There are realistically affected users who can't change the new defaults.
How is that not a site specific problem they introduced? There's no standard pathname because there are valid reasons why you want to have nothing on the local system, such as when it doesn't have a local disk.
If you (read as "the admins") have configured the system where there's very few acceptable locations to store local data, and that's a specific need, then it's up to the admins to provide a solution to the problem, not the Debian distro, which is flexible enough to handle this fine.
It's not that hard to create your own location for data if you need to, and symlink to it from other locations if required. Need a /tmp/$USER to be a local disk location and /tmp is a ramdisk? Create a script that sets up the correct local location and created a symlink to it in /tmp and make sure it's run on boot and maybe once daily. Both cron and systemd solutions could work for this. Worried that user tmp files will be cleaned out when they shouldn't be? Put in the correct exceptions for tmpwatch or whatever debian uses, or disable that service.
Not only is this not rocket science, it's literally the job of the admins that design the OS deployment so that it works for the intended use cases.
How is that not a site specific problem they introduced? There's no standard pathname because there are valid reasons why you want to have nothing on the local system, such as when it doesn't have a local disk.
If you (read as "the admins") have configured the system where there's very few acceptable locations to store local data, and that's a specific need, then it's up to the admins to provide a solution to the problem, not the Debian distro, which is flexible enough to handle this fine.
It's not that hard to create your own location for data if you need to, and symlink to it from other locations if required. Need a /tmp/$USER to be a local disk location and /tmp is a ramdisk? Create a script that sets up the correct local location and created a symlink to it in /tmp and make sure it's run on boot and maybe once daily. Both cron and systemd solutions could work for this. Worried that user tmp files will be cleaned out when they shouldn't be? Put in the correct exceptions for tmpwatch or whatever debian uses, or disable that service.
Not only is this not rocket science, it's literally the job of the admins that design the OS deployment so that it works for the intended use cases.