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from the all-your-computer-are-belong-to-us dept.
At the All Systems Go conference in Berlin 20-22 September, Lennart Poettering proposed a new extension to systemd, systemd-homed.service. A video of his session can be downloaded from media.ccc.de with accompanying slides [PDF].
In his presentation, Poettering outlines a number of problems he sees with the current system, like /etc needs to be writeable, UIDs need to be consistent across systems, and lack of encryption and resource management.
His goals with the proposed solution are migrateable and self-contained, UID-independent home directories with extensible user records that unify the user's password and encryption key; LUKS locking on system suspend; and Yubikey support.
He identifies a number of problems this new idea could cause with SSH logins, disk space assignments, UID assignments, and LUKS locking.
He plans to introduce JSON user records that can be queried via a Varlink interface and to a certain extent are convertible to and from existing formats. The home directories will be stored as LUKS-encrypted files that will be managed by the proposed new service, systemd-homed.service. The system integration will be supported by pam_systemd and systemd-logind.service.
It will be interesting to see how the world responds to this new take on systemd's ever-increasing encroachment of Linux.
... and lastly, this story is brought to you from a systemd-free laptop.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday September 22 2019, @02:45PM (7 children)
It's not a Microsoft conspiracy per se. More like, it's the C++ thought process trying to abstract and generalize everything that leads to this convergent "evolution" where engineers disregard the edge cases they're paid to solve when describing the issue at hand.
The whole registry-like "JSON user records that can be queried via a Varlink interface" concept is such a thing. Instead of acknowledging the different needs of different applications to organize their data and runtime settings in different ways by allocating them directories under ~/.config/, he's trying to force everyone into little boxes he built out of JSON. As a result, we'll have yet another standard for storing preferences.
compiling...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @05:46PM (2 children)
It comes to be too much of a stretch to consider the thing Unix-like at all. Its having a common binary format with traditional GNU/Linux should be considered legacy and not commonality; like OS/2 and Win9x/NT both having EXEs.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @06:14PM (1 child)
POS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 22 2019, @07:35PM
POEttering
FTFY
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:55AM (3 children)
What's this about ~/.config/ ? What's wrong with ~/.$appname ?
(Score: 2) by SemperOSS on Monday September 23 2019, @10:28AM (2 children)
I do not like my home directory too cluttered. Currently it consists of the following hidden files (produced with ls -1dF):
I would rather see one like:
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Wednesday September 25 2019, @11:54PM (1 child)
I can understand your not wanting a particular directory to get clutter. In contrast, I'd like to know where everything for a given application is. I'd rather know my info for firefox is in ~/.firefox and not have to guess which pieces are in .config/firefox, .cache/firefox, .local/firefox, .local/share/firefox, ... Add to that the reality that I current also have to look in various other directories like .gnome/*.
Now if those all go in one ~/.hidden/* directory, fine. But having each application's data spread across all these directories was a big step backwards for me on the backup / restore / migration front.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SemperOSS on Thursday September 26 2019, @12:31PM
Fair enough, and I could easily accept that, provided they all go under something like a .App directory. That would also clear up the home directory. I would still like .cache to be separate, though, as I do not back up cache files.
I personally prefer the separation between caches, configuration and local data, as they have different backup schedules: caches never, configuration when it changes and local data on a regular basis. Some well-placed symbolic links might give us the best of both worlds, if only programs like rsync would know when to follow symbolic links and when not to.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?