Re: All your home dir are belong to us
Reply #18 –
I think one of the issues is that it's terribly named and badly documented.
'systemd-tmpfiles' and 'etmpfiles' hint that this is going to relate to temporary files.
Then reading the man page at the start of the description is:
Which again suggests it is all about volatile and temporary files and directories.
Only later in the description do we see:
System services (systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service, systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev-early.service,
systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service, systemd-tmpfiles-clean.service) invoke systemd-tmpfiles to create system
files and to perform system wide cleanup.
A lot of the .confs in /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d reference files and directories which a normal user would not consider volatile or temporary.
But if, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, this functionality is aimed at 'cloud' servers and rapidly spun up and removed instances then I suppose it could be argued that every file under / is volatile or temporary.
I suspect that once upon a time systemd-tmpfiles did just concern itself with volatile and temporary files and directories.
And then in standard systemd fashion it was decided that systemd-tmpfiles should get involved in all your system files? And most bizarrely even your home dir.
Just a guess.
At some point soon I'm going to experiment with a artix-bootstrap install where I'll replace etmpfiles with a dummy package and then install all the packages I have installed on my normal system and see how much is broken with the lack of etmpfiles.