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Systemd-implementation of "rm -rf" Buggy, Could Erase Root Partition

posted by cmn32480 on Monday April 17 2017, @08:34PM   
from the people-that-live-in-a-bubble dept.

Soylentbob writes:

Edit: The link.

There were lots of good titles for this submission, as in "Breaking news: Poettering clueless?" to finally disprove Betteridge's law, or "systemd surprisingly not as good as advertised" or "Breaking new: systemd broken" or "Poettering censors critics after epic fail".

Systemd implementation of "rm -rf .*" will follow ".." to upper directory and erase /

How to reproduce:
        # mkdir -p /foo/dir{1,2}

        # touch /foo/.bar{1,2}

        # cat /etc/tmpfiles.d/test.conf

        R! /foo/.* - - - - -

        Reboot.

After the issue was fixed, finally Poettering added this gem of wisdom:

I am not sure I'd consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it's a UNIX pitfall, but "rm -rf /foo/.*" will work the exact same way, no?

The answer to this question, as many clarified for him, obviously is a loud "NO!". After being told a couple of times in no uncertain terms, the thread was closed for non-developers

poettering locked and limited conversation to collaborators 4 hours ago

for which I proposed the "freedom-of-speech" department (although I admit it is a weak proposal).

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Original Submission

• Re:Oh dear .... Re:Oh dear .... (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday April 17 2017, @09:37PM (3 children)

  by bob_super (1357) on Monday April 17 2017, @09:37PM (#495527)

  On the positive side, Canonical just freed a whole bunch of Unity and Mir developers, who could make short work of removing systemd from Ubuntu...
  Pretty please?

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2

• Re:Oh dear .... Re:Oh dear .... (Score: 4, Interesting) by NCommander on Monday April 17 2017, @10:04PM (2 children)

  by NCommander (2) <michael@casadevall.pro> on Monday April 17 2017, @10:04PM (#495554) Homepage Journal

  Most of them were let go as far as I know based on what I heard from my old contacts there. As much as I hate systemd, I actually understand this because Debian switched to systemd. Upstart was a drop-in replacement so Ubuntu packages could take advantage of it while sysvinit scripts would "just work".

  (ex-Canonicaler, but I have friends there)

  --
  Still always moving

  Parent

  • Re:Oh dear .... Re:Oh dear .... (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:03AM (1 child)

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:03AM (#495701) Homepage Journal

    Debian was the true disappointment for me. After that I also switched to systemd.

    Parent

    • Re:Oh dear .... (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @11:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @11:26AM (#495792)

      I run Debian with openrc on all my systems, and haven't run into any issues with that -- except having to edit Xwrapper.config to allow startx to work without logind.

      Of course, I don't use anything Gnome either.

      Parent