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A friend of mine joked when this came to light the other day that we should start the timer to see how long it would be before some SystemD person crawled out of the woodwork to say that was expected behavior and you're an idiot for using it wrong. And we laughed to ourselves, wouldn't that would be funny, that really is the reputation they have now isn't it.

Well, jokes on us, because that's the first fucking comment on the bug.

github.com/systemd/systemd/iss

Look, "/home is a tempfile" isn't just a footgun, or a bug.

It's an explicit ideological attack on the whole idea of what Linux is and who Linux is for.

If /home is just a tempfile to be purged when drivespace pressure hits some arbitrary threshold then Linux is a corporate-owned SAAS shim, and that's all it is. It's not just "breaking userspace", it's abandoning the idea that the people using that space and the stuff they've made there matter at all.

@mhoye It's hilarious that everyone is still ranting about this (with a questionable spin on things) while upstream already implemented and backported a restriction of the usage of the parameter in question to prevent this (deleting home) from happening and clarification for the intended use-case. Which is not at all freeing up space by deleting tempfiles. Yes the tool's name is misleading, but if you ever maintained a sizeable project you should be able to relate to not wanting to rename.

@imsodin Everything you've just said is wrong.

The bug got fixed after public outcry, but the working culture that allowed that bug to exist in the first place hasn't changed at all and that's the problem.

If you've ever maintained a sizeable project, you know that long term, discoverability and legibility outweigh literally everything else, and when you find a problem with supportability you can solve with grep you take that win every single time.

Also, this shit's not funny in the least.

Simon Frei

@mhoye You may chose to believe that, the convo in the bug report and actions beg to differ. Sure the original state was bad, but it's clear there was nothing intentional or systematic about it. Like actually considering /home as temporary and wanting to purge it, as it widely insinuated. Anyway, I doubt there are any open minds in this discussions, si bit much point having them (yeah I realise that's inconsistent with me answering, I can't help it and don't claim to be fully rational (or close to) :) ).

@imsodin "Nothing intentional?" Guy, _read the bug_.

bluca's opening comment is quite literally "this is working as intended and you are stupid".

The second comment says explicitly "the tool itself is nothing wrong."

It's not until you're 2/3rds of the way down the page that someone says "We need to rethink how --purge works. The principle of not ever destroying user data is paramount" and the next 2 comments from Poettering and Bluca are repeating that No Actually It's Right Actually.

@mhoye Yeah it is "right", as that's always in the eye of the beholder: You do want to purge user files if there user really wants to, e.g. application data when purge uninstalling that application. And it's super unlikely that anyone ever wants to do that with everything on their system, i.e. using it without a config file like the original reporter did. And now doing that is disallowed. I don't defend the original state as being good or anything, it's just ridiculous how people conflate nit being aware of/ignoring a problematic possible (mis)use of a tool with a conspiracy of systematic intention of harming userspace.
Oh and yes, Luca's communication here (not dating it's the only time) is not conductive of a constructive discussion (to put it mildly) - if that was what you all were complaining about, that would make a lot more sense.

@imsodin @mhoye So you agree
1) the tool was improperly designed
2) the tool was improperly documented
3) the bug were improperly triaged
4) the bug improperly managed

So what is your issue with being annoyed about being annoyed that things were put in a state where you could destroy your system using a tool where the documentation implies that it does something that *isn't* destroy the system?

@silverwizard @mhoye 1) not ideal maybe 2) yes 3) 4) no - there was one contributor reacting not very helpfully, but overall the reaction to the report went into the right direction and quickly so.
Also I wasn't poking at "being annoyed", I was poking at all the conjecture about intent and outrage, ask the huge noise being made over this (at least many outraged and well populated toots made it into my timeline, a perfectly objective measure of scale of outrage of course).

@imsodin I see - so you don't understand how these things point to a core problem in the project and are not concern about the project nor its future, and think we should be less worried? I think you'll find most of the people making the noise disagree.

@silverwizard Oh I know they do, and a minority is also doing something about it (e.g. devuan and guix people), not just because of this but because of more reasonable concerns instead of just making a ruckuss like a majority (I suspect). I did read some issues with systemd I agree with (ok a few even), but nothing related to the issue here. Expect maybe the comm style exemplified by Luca here, but that's an unfortunately quite widespread issue not restricted to systemd only.