Initially the bug report was shot down by systemd developer Luca Boccassi of Microsoft with:
So an option that is literally documented as saying “all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d/ entry will be deleted”, that you knew nothing about, sounded like a “good idea”? Did you even go and look what tmpfiles.d entries you had beforehand?
Maybe don’t just run random commands that you know nothing about, while ignoring what the documentation tells you? Just a thought eh"
Good devs, good product, I’m really excited about our shitty, shitty future.
Editorializing the title and putting nothing but polemics into the description paints you in a worse light than it does the systemd devs.
Don’t care.
I think we should fail --purge if no config file is specified on the command line. I see no world where an invocation without one would make sense, and it would have caught the problem here. —poettering
And that was what they did in the patch.
This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x’s “Recent Documents” feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to “clear recent documents” it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.
At the time, the “Recent Documents” feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.
Or perhaps more relevantly, that one Steam
bashscript that could delete things it shouldn’t under some very rare circumstances.There was a KDE theme recently that was deleting home folders
Unfortunate. However, one bad move doesn’t justify dismissing systemd altogether.
Do I wish for s6 and dinit to be competitive with systemd? Absolutely. Do I wish for systemd what PipeWire has been for PulseAudio? Yes, please. Do I wish that distros/DEs would be less reliant on systemd? Hell yeah! (Can I please have an rpm-based distro without systemd?)
But, unfortunately, at least for now, systemd is the most robust and (somehow) most polished init we got. And I’m actually grateful for that.
@nick I don’t know. I can understand both sides.
Users searching for solutions of their problems, stumbling upon a new functionality and test it out without doing what it does.
Developers specifying what it does and therefore expect people would know what they are doing.
Anyway a compromise got merged to make it more difficult for users to accidentally mess up. Which is probably good. But I don’t think you need to handhold users all the time…
@nick Hmm, wasn’t systemd the emacs of init systems?
Haha yeah I guess kinda. It just does too much
systemd now is focused around image-based systems. There is a huge gap between this design and traditional distros. I hate how the linux community has nothing in between of these two polar opposite approaches.
–purge is NOT documented in man for systemd-tmpfiles
It was added in v256, maybe you don’t have that yet
That could be it actually, I’ll have to check when I have access to my computer
“If you can’t win, lead.” Systemd development is in the hands of Microsoft employees. systemd has taken over almost all of Linux. Experts answer - in whose hands is Linux now? :)
Most subtle instance of Microsoft’s Embrace-Extend-Extinguish to date.
