“Systemd is the future”

Initially the bug report was shot down by systemd developer Luca Boccassi of Microsoft with:

So an option that is literally documented as saying “all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d/ entry will be deleted”, that you knew nothing about, sounded like a “good idea”? Did you even go and look what tmpfiles.d entries you had beforehand?

Maybe don’t just run random commands that you know nothing about, while ignoring what the documentation tells you? Just a thought eh"

Good devs, good product, I’m really excited about our shitty, shitty future.

lung,
@lung@lemmy.world avatar

I mean that argument is ridiculous, saying that things are “documented” when the thing is literally called tmpfiles.d and the man page starts with the following explanation:

It is mostly commonly used for volatile and temporary files and directories (such as those located under /run/, /tmp/, /var/tmp/, the API file systems such as /sys/ or /proc/, as well as some other directories below /var/).

So basically some genius decided that its a good idea to reuse this system for creating non-tmp directories. Overall my opinion of systemd is reluctant acceptance though I always wondered why the old way was a problem. Need a service started on boot? Well, we had crontab and sysvinit with some plain files. Need a service shut down? Well that’s the kill command. I guess I don’t really know why systemd was made

CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV,
@CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV@lemmy.world avatar

It is shown by non-systemd distros that systemd doesn’t really solve problems for desktop usage. When you switch away, not much changes basically. I sometimes hear that it is a different story on servers.

biribiri11, (edited )

I sometimes hear that it is a different story on servers.

Wonder what their usages are, especially in a container-focused world, where most containers simply don’t have an init, and the base system just needs, at most, to have a container runtime (+/- a few other things, see: talos linux and their 130MB bare-metal ISOs).

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Systemd is very useful for managing (rootless) Podman containers.

biribiri11,

I actually do use quadlets on my server which are absolutely fantastic and hook into systemd, but I don’t see any reason why a similar init system couldn’t do similar or even contribute something like podman generate systemd but for a different init system.

cbarrick,

Exactly.

My take is that the issue isn’t with tmpfiles.d, but rather the decision to use it for creating home directories.

timbuck2themoon,

As someone who was around for the sysvinit to systemdd change, I’ll take the latter every single day and twice on Sunday.

Terrible topic but systemd itself is a godsend IMO, warts and all.

Technus,

Someone should force this guy to read about the principle of least astonishment.

Doesn’t surprise me that a developer from Microsoft doesn’t understand this. To this day, when I select “Update and Shut Down” in Windows, it only actually shuts the computer down about half the time.

thingsiplay,

To this day, when I select “Update and Shut Down” in Windows, it only actually shuts the computer down about half the time.

And that surprises you?

Technus,

At this point, no. But it’s still incredibly annoying and a little spooky when I’m laying in bed and I see my computer screen light up in the next room when it’s not supposed to.

It’ll even wake itself from sleep when it wants to update, but it won’t start it automatically, I think because it hits the lock screen.

I’ll probably try Linux on ir when Windows 10 hits EOL.

greyw0lv,

The instant I’m out of school im deleting my windows install. I also have the sleep mode being useless because windows just wakes up sporadically.

Bookmeat,

Hey, it’s better than the gnome developers who will just close your issue when the discussion gets “too heated” or they refuse to see your use case as valid.

Technus,

lemmy.zip/comment/11156711

It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but I get where it’s coming from.

perishthethought,

Yah, if a developer wants to call all/most of his users ‘idiots’, they should have someone else interact with users.

Technus,

Wanting to and actually doing it are two different things.

The problem is that open source devs also have to be their own project managers, but those two jobs have very different skillsets.

In regular software development, it’s the PM’s job to deal with the drama, filter the idiocy out and collect concise and actionable user stories, and let the developers just write code.

In open source, you tend to deal with a lot of entitlement. All kinds of people, who never gave you a dime, come out out of the woodwork to yell at you over every little change. The bigger and farther reaching a project is, the more this happens, and it wears you down. I can only imagine what it’s like working on a huge project like GNOME.

And the toxicity feeds into itself. Be kurt with one person, and suddenly it gets out that you’re an asshole to users. Then people come in expecting hostility and react defensively to every little comment. And that puts you in the same mindset.

At the end of the day, you can’t satisfy everyone. Sometimes you gotta figure out how to tell someone their feature request is stupid and you’re not gonna work on it, especially not for free. And a lot of people need to learn to try to fix problems themselves before opening an issue. That’s kind of the whole point of open source.

possiblylinux127,

Chill man, Microsoft hired him to develop systemd as they use a ton of Linux in Azure.

purplemonkeymad,

Doesn’t have to be update and shutdown, I will click shutdown and it just reboots. Even disabled fast startup, so it’s not getting a wake event just as it’s hibernating.

Exec,
@Exec@pawb.social avatar

Doesn’t surprise me that a developer from Microsoft doesn’t understand this. To this day, when I select “Update and Shut Down” in Windows, it only actually shuts the computer down about half the time.

There are some tasks that only can be done when the majority of the system is not in use. Windows prepares the files, reboots, does its thing in a preboot environment, then it actually shuts down.

e8d79,

Editorializing the title and putting nothing but polemics into the description paints you in a worse light than it does the systemd devs.

nick,

Don’t care.

ramielrowe,

After briefly reading about systemd’s tmpfiles.d, I have to ask why it was used to create home directories in the first place. The documentation I read said it was for volatile files. Is a users home directory considered volatile? Was this something the user set up, or the distro they were using. If the distro, this seems like a lot of ire at someone who really doesn’t deserve it.

Bitrot,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I thought the same, surely some distribution messed up.

They didn’t. Systemd ships this file as /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/home.conf. That is a valid configuration directory, the lowest priority, and not just an example.

Basically it would only take effect in certain scenarios, and in most distributions it is doing nothing. Except when someone ran purge and it cleared files it had no hand in creating.

So yeah, this was actually a big issue.

lung,
@lung@lemmy.world avatar

I guess reading the history, systemd did a better job of dependency resolution and parallel loading of startup services. Then some less interesting stuff like logins, permissions, and device management - which definitely seems out of scope. There’s been like 15 alternatives since it was made, but none of them got critical mass, and now pretty much every mainstream distro can’t run without it. Sad face

While I’m here complaining, I really miss the days when Arch was configured from a single global file that handled many things like setting your hostname, locale, etc. I think it was dropped bc of maintenance & being not unixy enough. Kinda ironic

Bitrot,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I think it was probably dropped to be more like other Linux distributions. The BSDs put a ton of stuff in rc.conf.

NekkoDroid,
@NekkoDroid@programming.dev avatar

which definitely seems out of scope.

Doesn’t seem out of scope for a system and service management suite. Like, the timeperiod where systemd was “just an init” was relativly brief (like half a year).

OpFARv30,

It’s bluca, yo.

As a random example, here is bluca breaking suspend-then-hibernate, then being a complete asshole about it, while other systemd devs are trying to put the fire out. Do read his code reviews on the latter. yuwata and keszybz have nerves of steel.

The current behaviour is fully expected and documented

bluca is cancer.

Llituro,
@Llituro@hexbear.net avatar

Jesus Christ, what a fucking asshole. Calls the very valid complaints “trolling” before locking the fucking thread

Bitrot,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

He’s trying to be a little Poettering.

I always think it’s crazy when employees of companies with paying customers act like such jackasses in public.

doeknius_gloek,

Funny to seem him arguing against HibernateDelaySec because of possible data loss, yet if systemd-tmpfiles purges your fucking home directory it’s “documented behaviour”. The superiority complex of some people…

efstajas, (edited )

Oof, that quote is the exact brand of nerd bullshit that makes my blood boil. “Sure, it may be horribly designed, complicated, hard to understand, unnecessarily dangerous and / or extremely misleading, but you have nOT rEAd ThE dOCUmeNtATiON, therefore it’s your fault and I’m immune to your criticism”. Except this instance is even worse than that, because the documentation for that command sounds just as innocent as the command itself. But I guess obviously something called “tmpfiles” is responsible for your home folder, how couldn’t you know that?

abadbronc,

Luca Boccassi sounds like he got pantsed a few too many times in high school.

Aatube,

I think we should fail --purge if no config file is specified on the command line. I see no world where an invocation without one would make sense, and it would have caught the problem here.
—poettering

And that was what they did in the patch.

Nibodhika,

For anyone defending the dev ensure you have the version before this patch and run systemd-tmpfiles --purge just a heads up, it will delete your home because /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/home.conf exists and lists your home as a temporary file. This is a HUGE issue, tmpfiles.d default behavior is to list /home as a temporary dir, that should NOT be the case. Their fix is also sort of bullshit, instead of removing home as a tmpdir they made it so that you need to specify which files to purge.

geneva_convenience,

Deleting your home directory on Linux is inevitable. A temporary classification is correct.

llii,

Huh, that was my first thougth. Why is /home/ configured in systemd-tmpfiles? Seems strange for me.

Laser,

E.g. for quick provisioning of containers or virtual machines, this is also to make sure the required directories always exist. In a normal distribution, /home already exists, so systemd-tmpfiles does nothing, but there are cases where you want to setup a standard directory structure and this is a declarative alternative to scripts with a lot of mkdir, chmod and chown.

The name systemd-tmpfiles is kind of historic at this point, but wasn’t changed due to backwards compatibility and all.

Nibodhika,

Then those containers or virtual machines should add this or create the home as needed. Having/home listed as a tmp file on regular systems is problematic by the nature of what tmpfiles claims it does.

Laser,

Then those containers or virtual machines should add this or create the home as needed.

systemd has its own containers, so this is the implementation of that requirement; “virtual machines” might use this exact binary to create home, among other directories like srv and what not. Someone at one point probably said “we always need to create these when spinning up systems, maybe systems can provide a mechanism to do that for us?” and then it was implemented.

Having/home listed as a tmp file on regular systems is problematic by the nature of what tmpfiles claims it does.

systemd-tmpfiles claims the following:

systemd-tmpfiles creates, deletes, and cleans up files and directories, using the configuration file format and location specified in tmpfiles.d(5). Historically, it was designed to manage volatile and temporary files, as the name suggests, but it provides generic file management functionality and can be used to manage any kind of files.

I rather think having a purge command was the issue here, at the very least it should print a big fat warning at what it does, better even list all affected files and directories. There’s no reason a normal user needs this and with the name of the binary, it’s totally misleading, which is an issue in these situations.

exu,

Is that a standard systemd configuration or something enabled by a distro?

Nibodhika,

I assume systemd standard since the two different distros I have (Ubuntu and Arch) have it there.

Scio,

The ‘d’ stands for drama.

And also dick.

Singular.

velox_vulnus, (edited )

Just pick a non-systemd distro instead of reinforcing this fear-mongering nonsense editorializing. I can’t tolerate corporate stooges putting their dick in our space, so I’ve switched to Guix. You have a choice, you can switch if you want to - nobody is stopping you. This way, you are also helping the maintainers and the contributors by giving them feedback.

0x0,

Slackware, Devuan… or Gentoo, which took the sanest approach and actually lets you choose init system, are all good alternatives too.

velox_vulnus,

And that’s not even the complete list (link may be a little dated, I think).

possiblylinux127,

This thread is just a excuse for old time systemd haters to start complain about how it Linux isn’t the same as it was 20 years ago.

This honestly has nothing to do with systemd and it could of been any software that did this. It is an issue of bad communication and people pulling from the very recent stuff. Also it is also a reminder to have proper backups especially when using upstream software.

poki,

Unfortunate. However, one bad move doesn’t justify dismissing systemd altogether.

Do I wish for s6 and dinit to be competitive with systemd? Absolutely. Do I wish for systemd what PipeWire has been for PulseAudio? Yes, please. Do I wish that distros/DEs would be less reliant on systemd? Hell yeah! (Can I please have an rpm-based distro without systemd?)

But, unfortunately, at least for now, systemd is the most robust and (somehow) most polished init we got. And I’m actually grateful for that.

xantoxis,

So an option that is literally documented as saying “all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d/ entry will be deleted”, that you knew nothing about, sounded like a “good idea”?

Bro, if it sounded like a good idea to someone, you didn’t fucking warn them enough. Don’t put this on them without considering what you did to confuse them.

Also, nfn, the systemd documentation is a nightmare to read through, even if you know exactly what you’re looking for.

(I’m still gonna keep using systemd because it’s better than the alternatives, though. OP, don’t write stuff off because 1 guy is a dick.)

Bitrot,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I thought surely some distribution had messed up by using this temporary files generator for /home, but that configuration is actually a file bundled with systemd and the purge would take effect even if the distribution was creating /home as part of the install (ignoring the tmpfiles config), which they pretty much all do. So yeah, any defense I had towards the dev is gone there.

biribiri11, (edited )

The guy replying is a total dick, and for people that like to encourage change to create software that evolves with needs, they sure do refuse to change when needs evolve.

This is definitely just a dangerous cause of that one xkcd. At the very least, Debian unstable caught something before it could reach everyone else. That works, I guess.

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