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).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Monday April 17 2017, @10:37PM (3 children)
What makes it interesting is that Poettering's reaction to the perfectly good and very important bug report is at the root of about half the things wrong with systemd. The other half are design flaws that would take a major re-working to fix the right way.
Even those might have been avoided if "shut up" wasn't the default reply to anything questioning the one true way.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Monday April 17 2017, @10:58PM (2 children)
Yeah, that's what I meant about his foot-in-mouth moment being the only reason it was noteworthy. Unfortunately, that's his default reaction to everything, so it isn't as interesting as the "we reinvented rm -rf" aspect. :/
But hey, at least he didn't accuse the submitter of hating handicapped people; that's arguably an improvement over how he's handled criticism in the past.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Monday April 17 2017, @11:18PM (1 child)
This is true.
As to why systemd needed it's own version, as near as I can tell they're trying to replace every critical piece of system software with one that is incestuously dependent on the rest of systemd. If people have too many useful standalone utilities it's too easy to give systemd the boot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:59PM
It is getting that way now. Ubuntu is neutered without systemd. It really does need to be broken up and removed.
If you can't remove a *nix program and swap in another in its place then something is seriously wrong.
It is horrifying looking at the dependencies dragged in when installing programs now. Why does an application have the init system as a dependency?