https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/20/systemd_2561_data_wipe_fix/
Following closely after the release of version 256, version 256.1 fixes a handful of bugs. One of these is emphatically not systemd-tmpfiles recursively deleting your entire home directory. That's a feature.
The 256.1 release is now out, containing some 38 minor changes and bugfixes. Among these are some changes to the help text around the systemd-tmpfiles command, which describes itself as a tool to "Create, delete, and clean up files and directories." Red Hat's RHEL documentation describes it as a tool for managing and cleaning up your temporary files.
That sounds innocuous enough, right?
It isn't, as Github user jedenastka discovered on Friday. He filed bug #33349 and the description makes for harrowing reading, not just because of the tool's entirely intended behavior, but also because of the systemd maintainers' response, which could be summarized as "you're doing it wrong".
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Saturday June 22 2024, @10:22PM (27 children)
With stories like this in mind, I have 3 ssd's in my main machine - running Mint, Devuan, and Void. Void, by the way, is the one I use most. Mint is the only one that uses systemd. Void is ait quirky, but solid. It is a rolling release so you never have to reinstall. JUST SAY NO TO SYSTEMD
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2024, @10:46PM (1 child)
I've said no to systemd. The borg just grins back at me.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Reziac on Sunday June 23 2024, @02:43AM
That's because there is no place like /home.
Not anymore, anyway...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2024, @11:22PM (24 children)
The fact that some data was accidentally trashed is not by itself a huge problem. Shit happens sometimes. The maintainer response is the problem.
Life is better if you stay as far away as possible from assholes like this.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RS3 on Sunday June 23 2024, @01:58AM (23 children)
I absolutely agree, have been and will continue to be 100% opposed to systemd.
Although the guy is obviously a big a-hole, he's been empowered. My much bigger concern is: why have so many major distros adopted systemd?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Reziac on Sunday June 23 2024, @02:48AM (22 children)
Once Debian and Fedora adopt anything, the die is cast. It may take a while for the outliers to die off, or achieve irrelevance.
The question is what became enough easier for them, which is probably the real motivation.
I understand why systemd came about,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo [youtube.com]
but why is it mucking about in things that have nothing to do with initializing the system?
Maybe shoulda been called borgd instead...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday June 23 2024, @03:10AM (17 children)
I don't like it but I'll accept it. But my question still stands: why did anyone adopt systemd?
I'm disappointed in the whole Linux subculture. I feel like it's too fragmented and yet trying to hard to be like Windows or MacOS.
Someone here (AC iirc) recommended MX and what little I've messed with it I liked it a lot. Debian without systemd, and with some great utilities. There are many other distros without systemd.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Reziac on Sunday June 23 2024, @03:45AM (8 children)
Yeah, my favorite is PCLinuxOS, no systemd. And rolling, which I've come to prefer.
So long as it Just Works I don't care one way or the other, but the durn thing needs to be ready for prime time before inflicting it on the users.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday June 23 2024, @10:36AM (5 children)
From the top of their website: "PCLinuxOS The Boomer Distribution"
Okay, I'll try it anyway. :)
Yeah, it looks really good. I wasn't a fan of .rpm when it first came out long ago, but I grew to like it, yum, etc. Looks like they'll run apt too. I don't know if anyone has a unified package manager, but that'd be 'uge.
I remember why I didn't try it when I was evaluating systemd-less distros: it's 64-bit only, and I have need for OS update on someone's 32-bit hardware. But I'll still try it for my own hardware.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Sunday June 23 2024, @02:10PM
I liked the Drak installer a lot better. Tex recently changed to one that actually requires user input if you want partitions. Used to be two clicks to confirm defaults, done. Don't feel like I can hand the new one to raw newbies.
Yeah, that's his GFY, Tex has no patience with dumb shit like the recent spate of hate for boomers (Day of the Pillow, as one guy puts it) by people incompetent to fix their own lives. ;P
You can do all the usual CLI package mgmt but I think I've needed to look outside Synaptic ... once? because at one point SeaMonkey wasn't available (so I just found an RPM and unzipped it). PCLOS apparently uses a hybrid; having no need to delve in the guts, I don't care. :)
The only real downside is that it's a one man band and when Tex goes (old guy and health not great) will anyone competent step up? Devuan now uses our desktop and general way of doing things, but Devuan has the same upgrade woes as Debian (which recently insisted that it must do a full reinstall... against my religion, I already dislike Debian, why are you selling me on =everything= else??).Still haven't found another I'd happily jump to, at need. So... PCLOS as long as I can.
Yeah, 32bit support got dropped a few years back... kind of a shame because it will run reasonably well on REALLY old hardware. I have it on a 2008 laptop of minimal specs (2GB RAM) and it's fine. With KDE desktop only uses about 600mb RAM, and with Trinity or Openbox only about 300mb. (Vs. a friend reported Ubuntu now using 1.9GB just to admire its navel. What are we, Windows 10??) On the newer hardware (i7-3xxx) and an old SSD, it's literally 5 seconds from boot to usable desktop.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2024, @04:28PM (3 children)
I just can't get over how dumb the name is--it's doubly redundant. "PCLinuxOS"...everybody knows Linux is an OS, and it being on PC is the main use case; why do you need to state it outright? Now you're left with a name that is breathtakingly generic, and if you get rid of all the redundancy reduces to "Linux". It doesn't even contain any unique info in the name at all :P
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 24 2024, @01:43PM
Agreed, it's a bloody silly name, but.... no worse than the weird and irrelevant names that so many linux things get tagged with. At least it's obvious what it is, no guesswork or lookups required. And that was kinda the point, I think.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday June 25 2024, @01:17PM (1 child)
No, no, no...
Linux is just a kernel, it is GNU/Linux. Stallman would turn over in his grave. Ducks....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 26 2024, @04:54AM
Let's just admit that the ship has sailed on that at some point in the last 33 years.
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Monday June 24 2024, @08:58AM (1 child)
Sounds interesting. Website says it uses apt. Did you ever tried installing application provided on alternative sites as apt packages or even debian repository packages with it? I still use Slackware nowadays along with debian as well.
It's easier to simply install an apt package on debian and a lot more stuff is available than in Slackware repositories. For Slackware you need to compile from sources sometimes or use alternative package sites.
Rolling releases sounds like a great idea too.
So, how compatible are debain packages with PCLinuxOS?
Thanks in advance!
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 24 2024, @01:40PM
I don't know, as when I want something I just fire up Synaptic and... our repository is freakin' huge. And the one time something wasn't there (SeaMonkey, of all things), I found an RPM and unzipped it and ran it directly (sort of a poor man's container). I think I've visited the command line... once? whereas with Fedora, I found it easier to do all the maintenance and installs in at the CL (Discover is just too freakin' slow, and fails on a slow connection).
Advantage, rolling is always up to date; busted things are fixed a lot faster, and I have not seen any deficits from "more bugs". Disadvantage, you need to stay on top of updates; if it gets severely out of date you may have trouble. But one of our number started from the oldest version that would still run (2011 or 2012 vintage) and rolled it all the way to the present (then 2022, IIRC) and only had to visit the CL twice to unstick something. My current install was done in 2017 and frozen about a year ago (good thing as turned out I needed an old Chrome...) and one of these days I ought to set up a fresh one.
I appreciate the slick performance (KDE desktop running at JWM speed, and minimal RAM usage), stability, and that everything Just Works. I used to mess with, uh, challenging OSs, but am past the stage where I'm willing to fight with the OS just to use it. With PCLOS I just install (a five minute process), do some cosmetic tweaks, done.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Unixnut on Sunday June 23 2024, @10:44AM (3 children)
Putting my cynic hat on (which unfortunately is right more often than not, especially in "business"), Redhat adopted systemd (to not say sponsored its development and is actively forcing on the Linux ecosystem) because it sees big money in support and consulting fees in the problems and obfuscation it creates. Being a RH creation they will always be in control of its development direction. They have the best documentation on it, would be the first to get bugfixes, new features, and the developers can make good consulting money on the side with support and modification of systemd for others.
One of the original big strengths of Linux was that it was open and hackable, with loads of little systems that could easily be replaced, modified and debugged without having to pay "consultants" a huge amount of money. Anyone who read a bit about shell programming could modify all these programs and how they connected to each other to make the system do what they wanted.
Contrast this with Windows which is basically a black box, where almost everything is shoved in "svchost", and you have to know arcane black magic to understand and configure the registry to do what you wanted it to (meaning lots of money for MS consultants).
The second was that Linux's reliability and openness meant that there really was little money to be made in providing support. Considering how many Linux systems are out there, the income generated from support and consulting was minuscule. Having worked in mixed Linux and Windows environments, I can tell you pre-systemd Linux was effectively bulletproof, it could run for months if not years without an issue.
As a result we had 5 MS sysadmins, always had an expensive MS support contract, and often had their consultants around to debug some issue or make some changes our sysadmins could not do. While Linux took care of itself so well that we only needed two Linux sysadmins for an estate 10x larger than the Windows one (and we only had two so that there was some redundancy if one of us was away).
RH looked at Microsoft and the sheer amount of money it generated on support contracts and consulting fees, and decided it wanted to emulate that. Hence why systemd is effectively a mirror of svchost, and gconf was a mirror of the windows registry. Given enough time I expect systemd to subsume everything between the kernel and application layer, becoming effectively "LinuxD", the Linux subsystem.
As to why Debian adopted it, I remember the eventual vote on whether to adopt systemd was very bitter, with accusations of bribary and "stacking the deck" of voters for systemd (along with all kinds of threats and abuse hurled about) and loads of resignations. The compromise was to allow "init choice" at install, with both systemd and other options available. When this compromise was rejected the Debian community split, those who split off formed Devuan [devuan.org], which is the only Linux distribution I have used since.
As both RedHat and Debian are the two "seed" distros from which almost all others were derived, getting those two to be "systemd only" was the first big success for systemd adoption.
The second one was that almost all proprietary Linux software ran on RHEL, so by RH adopting systemd all those proprietary software companies adopted it too. That effectively gave no alternative to adopting systemd for companies that use Linux, because even if you could hack the proprietary software to run on a non systemd Linux, you would not get any support from the supplier for the setup.
Devuan (and other distros) are holding their own well against the onslaught, but due to the above they are unlikely every to be used in Enterprise environments, and as systemd subsumes more and more of Linux subsystems, they will drift further apart in compatibility (not to mention the increasing workload to fork and maintain every single subsystem) and end up on the fringes.
Well, the original Linux users from long ago are now a minority. A large influx of people from the Windows world entered Linux, without understanding the Unix philosophy nor the culture, and most not really caring (they just wanted a "free" OS). Ex Windows developers brought their design and development mindset, and effectively started re-implementing what they knew from Windows on Linux.
They are generally the ones who are most "pro systemd", and do try hard to make Linux into Windows. The above occurred to me when one of our Windows sysadmins sang the praises of systemd. He found it much easier to understand because it reminded him of Windows which allowed him to put "Windows and Linux sysadmin" on his CV.
Correspondingly MS has been implementing more and more of Linux on a Windows core, perhaps when the "LinuxD" project is finished you may be able to run the entire thing as a subsystem on Windows in a transparent fashion. The ultimate embrace, extend and extinguish.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday June 24 2024, @01:56PM (2 children)
I just read somewhere that the linux subsystem for Windows now supports systemd.
I doubt the original idea was for RH to monopolize support, but as with all complicated things where you control how it goes, that's certainly how it's going to end up, and the bean counters will have no complaint.
The non-systemd and non-Wayland distros (I use one of 'em) are already fringe, they just haven't yet fallen far enough behind to become nonviable, or forked and fragmented into total irrelevance. It's unfortunate, but I think was predictable as soon as linux penetrated the paying market enough for non-gurus to appear and need support. RH just got there first.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday June 25 2024, @10:20AM (1 child)
Correct it does but support is not yet complete, plus systemd has not yet subsumed enough of the Linux OS layer to be a complete abstraction away from the kernel. I suspect if systemd successfully becomes an abstraction layer between the application layer and kernel layer, you will be able to run what looks like a full Linux distro under Windows.
Already some companies I worked give developers Windows with the Linux subsystem and say "it is just like Linux" instead of actually offering a Linux machine. It isn't "just like Linux" but from their point of view they just need one OS, one support contract and everyone can be managed by Active Directory. Much simpler than a separate Windows/Linux infrastructure.
Why doubt it? It seems logical, and from a business perspective it seems like a definite way to increase revenue. Don't forget Red Hat was bought by IBM. IBM as we know is very big on making money on consulting and support fees, that is their bread and butter. They also don't shy away from obfuscation and lock-out of systems so that you have to use their support and consulting services.
I also ponder if there is a larger fight going on between IBM and MS for the share of the OS market. After all Microsoft through SCO launched some serious legal attacks against IBM and Linux in the 00's, not to mention all the FUD against Linux.
Now IBM through Red Hat is effectively turning Linux into an equivalent of Windows in order to compete directly against Microsoft for the enterprise market, while Microsoft builds out its subsystem in order to successfully subsume Linux into a Windows service and neuter the threat.
I agree, but I think the point where they become non-viable is coming close. The Devuan team have done a great job ripping out as much of systemd as they can but as I can see from the mailing lists, it is getting harder and harder.
Firstly as systemd takes over more Linux systems, they have to fork the original systems and maintain them, which takes a lot of man power and as no companies are interested in a non-systemd Linux (for reasons mentioned in the previous post), nobody is really willing to pay developers to work on the non-systemd code, meaning it is left to volunteers.
Secondly they find themselves implementing systemd "shims" so much now to get programs to work that some on the list started joking that Pottering has got us inadvertently re-implementing systemd for him.
I do feel like it is a losing battle which is why I started moving to FreeBSD a couple of years ago. The servers were moved first because they were easier to migrate, leaving Devuan on my workstations.
However a few months ago I moved my main desktop workstation to FreeBSD after a Devuan upgrade to the latest stable broke my graphics. The Nvidia driver is proprietary and assumed systemd exists on the Linux machine. It tried to register some nvidia systemd component which predictably failed, borking the install and preventing the driver from working.
After a week of trying to get Devuan to boot with a GUI, including multiple re-installs I gave up and set up FreeBSD as I needed the system up for work. It took a bit of fiddling but once working seems perfectly suitable as a replacement (Except sleep/resume doesn't work, a throwback to the early 00's Linux).
Unfortunately unless there is a sea change in the Linux ecosystem I suspect events like the above will become more common. Things will just get harder and harder for non-systemd distro's to keep compatibility. Eventually they may well turn into nothing more than hobby/experimental distros, not fit for everyday use.
As the moment my laptop is the only Linux OS I have left. Simply because suspend/resume works on it and it does not need a proprietary graphics driver to work, so the Nvidia issue above has not occurred. However I feel it is a matter of time until even that drifts too far out of compatibility.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday June 25 2024, @01:33PM
Myself, I'm not running servers or needing to support a bunch of systems; I just wanted something that didn't make my eyes bleed like Win10 did (and still does) and where the file manager (where I more or less live when I'm not doing something else) doesn't make me want to string up a UI developer. A good stable desktop OS that would give me no grief and would Just Work. (I was spoiled by XP; suits me very well, never a bit of trouble and uptimes measured in years, and the ability to make it wholly restful to the aging eyes. And I'm past where I'm willing to fight the everyday OS to a draw. Immediate surrender or it's on the next prospect.)
Daily driver is still XP64 (deal with it, world, I'm safer than you are). Mostly PCLinuxOS when I need "modern". And a whole stack of small HDs and a hotswap bay for Test OSs (have found live and installed are often not the same). But as you say... "Eventually they may well turn into nothing more than hobby/experimental distros, not fit for everyday use." I think it's already to that point. And an awful lot of 'em are one or two guys struggling to keep up. So I've been hunting a distro that suits me as well as PCLOS and that has a definite future in the linux ecosystem, but so far have found only tolerable, not "I enjoy using this" and "everything works". So far Fedora/KDE is the least trouble and least annoying but jaysus the performance is nowhere close to PCLOS, which runs like the wind on any piece of crap. Not quite Puppy, but close.
"The Nvidia driver is proprietary and assumed systemd exists on the Linux machine."
Oh. Oh dear. This perhaps explains why a recent attempt to install PCLOS (which happens to be non-systemd) on Default VM Hardware... simply refused to work. And perhaps why on real hardware with random vidcard (would have to check what's in there), Devuan was weird after an update, to where I deemed it "needs a do-over" and Debian refused to update at all.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by owl on Sunday June 23 2024, @03:27PM (1 child)
Consider the systemd creator (i.e., supreme asshole Lennart Poettering (LP)).
Consider LP's current employer: "Microsoft".
You can make the connections yourself.......
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Monday June 24 2024, @02:03PM
I say lock LP and RMS in a small room together, and watch the fun...
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 25 2024, @01:11AM
Sabotage? Maybe someone was inspired by the CIA sabotage manual? https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf [cia.gov]
I see a similar thing going on with Windows though...
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 27 2024, @03:48PM
I've been running Gentoo Linux, with Runit for the init system, pipewire instead of pulseaudio, Wayland instead of X, btrfs with data compression for the system partition and btrfs without data compression for /home. I had hoped years of hardware speedups would make all that compiling no big deal. Wrong. Still takes hours to do an update. I do not recommend Gentoo Linux. But if you want all this leading edge software, that is, not just a good alternative to systemd, but also Wayland, pipewire, btrfs, and the most recent Linux kernels, there are not a lot of options. Those distros that avoid systemd tend to also stick to X, and ext4. And maybe, for audio have just plain ALSA, though I think most are pulseaudio.
As for Wayland and pipewire, you are still pushed hard to have compatibility with X and pulseaudio respectively. Too many apps need that. And, sigh, some systemd compatibility is now hard to avoid.
Around 2008, I was running Arch Linux, a pretty good distro that was not on the systemd bandwagon. Then they got on. It was a mess. I am used to using text utilities such as tail, less, and grep to look at /var/log/messages, but Arch's switch to systemd upended all that. They moved messages, and I had to find out whether it had been entirely replaced, and if not, where it had gone. It had been put in a subdirectory of /var/log. and changed to some sort of compressed binary format that the text utilities could not read. I finally learned sysadmins were now to use this new command, journalctl. I quickly ran into the first disadvantage of this new setup: tail was instantaneous at reading the latest messages, journalctl needed a full 30 seconds to decompress the entire log file just to display the most recent messages. Now, that particular setup was, I gather, a design decision of Arch, and that systemd had merely provided the option to do logging that way. IIRC Arch soon backtracked. But there were other problems. To read that systemd sometimes failed to log every message, woof, that tore it. I ditched Arch.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Sunday June 23 2024, @05:41AM (1 child)
I think of it as everythingd. It started out intended to do one thing and over time has become the creeping death that overruns, well, everything.
Same as borgd, but I think everythingd is a more useful description.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Reziac on Sunday June 23 2024, @06:04AM
Yep, if you say everythingd, there's no doubt what you mean!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 27 2024, @04:08PM (1 child)
I wonder about the 'd' part. Is 'D' the grade it received in the Operating Systems class? Can't wait for systemf!
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday June 27 2024, @05:51PM
Hmm. That is a good question. And what happened to systema, systemb, systemc...??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DrkShadow on Sunday June 23 2024, @12:13AM (7 children)
Debian adopted Systemd because it was an init system that made things faster, and in their view better.
However, now they're slotting a shit-ton of things into systemd that Debian *did not* review or accept. Still... Debian just keeps "taking it" (however you want to think of them taking it, they just keep taking it. Now they're taking it from Microsoft.)
How does this change the discussion? are the same parties still saying the same things? There was apparently strife internally in the Debian project over systemd originally, back before it had all of this additional attack surface, ..
Anyway, with Systemd inserting tools, utilities, inserting itself into opensshd, creating a whole-new user-land (as far as the /usr/bin, /bin combination?) that Debian didn't discuss or agree to -- what's the likelihood that these projects are going to reconsider their systemd dependency? (or fork it into something more reasonable, drastically more stable and predictable?)
In my view "all the other distros" adopted Systemd because.. they're all based on either Debian or Redhat. That's why it's infected "all" of the distros. (I can't explain Arch, and Gentoo has a split - because so much depends on systemd. Unsure about alpine.)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday June 23 2024, @02:31AM (3 children)
Debian adopted systemd in a vote where there were a variety of accusations of shenanigans in the voting. It was controversial enough that Devuan forked off soon after as a result.
I did find it interesting that Lennart seemed to actually be the voice of reason on the bug report, which is a bit unusual given the number of times he's been told off for treating bug reports as not a bug. But I guess his own career is pretty secure at this point, which was really the point of the whole systemd exercise, so he now doesn't have to be as much of a jerk about things.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Sunday June 23 2024, @06:16AM (1 child)
honestly, a lot of things are docker-oriented now-adays. Docker and kubernetes.
So instead of basing all of my projects on an Ubuntu image, or even a Debian image any more, I'm going to start basing them on a Devuan image. Let those usage metrics RISE!!!
It looks like Alpine Linux is also *not* systemd-corrupted. So that really leaves only Redhat, Debian, and Arch(???) (and things based on them).
(Score: 3, Informative) by owl on Sunday June 23 2024, @03:39PM
Slackware is also blissfully systemd free.
(Score: 4, Touché) by gtomorrow on Sunday June 23 2024, @06:21AM
When in the history of the world have you ever had a jerk of position become less so when higher up in the hierarchy?
Just askin' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Score: 4, Interesting) by rleigh on Sunday June 23 2024, @08:26AM (1 child)
Yep. Quite a few of us in Debian at the time pointed out the folly of adopting something which was continually changing its scope, and that it was the thin edge of the wedge. Obviously this viewpoint did not win out but clearly wasn't wrong.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Sunday June 23 2024, @10:54AM
Not only was it clearly not wrong, the pro-systemd Debian voices actually made the point themselves during the debate that eventually systemd would subsume so much stuff that running it would be mandatory.
That was their entire argument for not allowing any alternative inits, something akin to "why waste resources offering other init systems when eventually systemd will be mandatory for all".
It is not for naught that the line modified from LOTR: "One Init to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" came to be as a result of systemd
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 24 2024, @02:07AM
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 5, Informative) by darkfeline on Sunday June 23 2024, @01:16AM (6 children)
tl;dr It's Debian's fault.
1. systemd-tmpfiles has a --purge flag to purge all tmpfiles
2. Debian creates the user's home directory by using systemd tmpfiles functionality
3. Therefore running systemd-tmpfiles --purge on Debian purges the home directory
I'd love to observe the backflips needed to blame this on systemd.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Reziac on Sunday June 23 2024, @02:50AM
"2. Debian creates the user's home directory by using systemd tmpfiles functionality"
Da fuck??
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by tekk on Sunday June 23 2024, @03:56AM
No backflips needed:
systemd included a tool which allows users to purge all tmpfiles.
The developer of this feature considers the user an idiot for not checking that /home was in a config file explicitly intended (per the documentation) for "volatile and temporary files and directories." (see the ticket.)
Additionally this is 0% Debian's fault. The maintainer of systemd-tmpfiles saying in an LWN comment that this is the *UPSTREAM* default: https://lwn.net/Articles/978622/ [lwn.net]
Even if the config file it's ridiculous to have this behavior: when the config entry is explicitly "Never clean this up" it should be left alone.
(Score: 4, Touché) by aafcac on Sunday June 23 2024, @05:13AM (1 child)
Why is this even systemd's responsibility in the first place. Some OSes don't save the contents of /tmp and even those that do, the user can easily set up a job to some, or all, of the contents. It makes no sense to give this to systemd in such a stupid way.
What's more, why does it have features that are useful in creating a home directory each boot? None of this makes sense.
(Score: 3, Touché) by owl on Sunday June 23 2024, @03:35PM
Because systemd, like The Borg [wikipedia.org], over time attempts to assimilate everything in its path and incorporate those things into its collective.
Whether those things want, or need, to be assimilated is irrelevant to systemd.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by epitaxial on Sunday June 23 2024, @07:30PM
Three layers of a shit sandwich right there.
If I type rm does rm assume the * wildcard and delete everything?
Why would ANY command have that be the default function?
(Score: 3, Touché) by bart9h on Wednesday June 26 2024, @02:07PM
tl;dr It's Debian's fault.
1. Debian adopted systemd
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Sunday June 23 2024, @01:16PM (1 child)
The features creep until they can no longer be recognized by original name. At some point, either change the name of the command or split its functionality.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Sunday June 23 2024, @08:02PM
I think that is the entire point, by subsuming commands people are already familiar with they take over, and make the "systemd way" the default.
If they created new names for all their commands people would just keep on using the old ones as they are already familiar with them, and more importantly there is a huge legacy of shell scripts out there that use the originals, meaning the new systemd commands would never really take off.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 24 2024, @06:37AM
If you are using systemd, then you are most definitely doing it wrong!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Monday June 24 2024, @01:34PM
Wow. Just noticed the part of that article where they noted how systemd developer Luca Boccassi literally referred to systemd v256 as "now with 42% less Unix philosophy". Haha...real knee slapper that one...we noticed, you brain-dead mother fucker.
That one tells you everything you need to know. Fuck all of these idiots.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday June 24 2024, @04:30PM (1 child)
I'm old enough to have used VAX/VMS and DIGITAL Command Language (DCL) [wikipedia.org] - the equivalent of the Unix shell - as my daily interface to things computing.
It had a PURGE command (look it up in a recentish PDF here (page 36): VSI OpenVMS - DCL Dictionary: N—Z [vmssoftware.com]
So when I see 'purge', I think of the VAX/VMS DCL implementation. So most recent versions of files should be left alone, be default.
Unfortunately, Linux filesystems don't support versioned files - there is/are a/some very non-mainstream experimental overlay/overlays - but nothing I'd 'bet the business on'.
I miss having reliable file versioning.
It also means that my interpretation of 'purge' is likely different to other people's, not steeped in the history of computing.
These days I shout at clouds, not at kids to get off the lawn.
(Score: 2) by psa on Monday June 24 2024, @08:14PM
I, too, was a VMS admin (and I do miss auto-versioned files). And I remember the sudden death of the OS. Switching to unix administration was a big deal, because they were the "enemy." But NT was a joke. I never expected it to gain such traction.
Anyway, I've seen major OSes die. I'm hopeful BSD can keep unix alive, but I think it will be harder as more and more OS-level utils are no longer possible on linux, shrinking the ecosystem. Whatever linux becomes when freedesktop.org gets done with it, it doesn't look like it's going to be unix anymore. And I don't see any other salvation in System V.