SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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