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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: 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.