"A good portion of my home directory got deleted," complained a bug report for systemd filed last week. It requested an update to a flag for the systemd-tmpfiles tool which cleans up files and directories: "a huge warning next to --purge. This option is dangerous, so it should be made clear that i...
I’m gonna be real. I dont think home directory files should handled by something named tmpfiles. I think something named tmpfiles should only handled volatile data as it is colloquially known. I get there’s a lot that can be considered that in home directories. But user data should be handled by something that is made for that and users inherently know by the name that this will mess your home directory. This only applies to monoliths and monoliths to be like systemd. Maybe you’re doing too much with a single program if your naming becomes problematic.
I’m gonna be real. I dont think home directory files should handled by something named tmpfiles.
But… but… it was in the documentation! /s
What killed me about the whole thing was how defensive the dev was about the whole thing, basically calling the reporter a moron for running a command without extensive knowledge of the entire system. I don’t care how good the documentation is, if open file proceeds to format your hard drive in some circumstances, you done goofed as a dev.
I agree his answer sucks, but perhaps the fault still lies with the distribution developers (who should know better), not the authors of systemd. In that context I can understand the resentment expressed by the dev. It’s not directed toward the end user but toward the distro developers, who have implemented systemd in a broken and dangerous way.
I’m gonna be real. I dont think home directory files should handled by something named tmpfiles. I think something named tmpfiles should only handled volatile data as it is colloquially known. I get there’s a lot that can be considered that in home directories. But user data should be handled by something that is made for that and users inherently know by the name that this will mess your home directory. This only applies to monoliths and monoliths to be like systemd. Maybe you’re doing too much with a single program if your naming becomes problematic.
But… but… it was in the documentation! /s
What killed me about the whole thing was how defensive the dev was about the whole thing, basically calling the reporter a moron for running a command without extensive knowledge of the entire system. I don’t care how good the documentation is, if
open fileproceeds to format your hard drive in some circumstances, you done goofed as a dev.I agree his answer sucks, but perhaps the fault still lies with the distribution developers (who should know better), not the authors of systemd. In that context I can understand the resentment expressed by the dev. It’s not directed toward the end user but toward the distro developers, who have implemented systemd in a broken and dangerous way.