tmpfiles footgun, apply directly to the forehead

Posted Jun 16, 2024 15:08 UTC (Sun) by jak90 (subscriber, #123821)
In reply to: tmpfiles footgun, apply directly to the forehead by flussence
Parent article: systemd 256 released

At least the documentation has been appended [1] to somewhat convoy the intention that the --purge switch is ”useful for purge/factory reset patterns” and not just to unconditionally empty temporary directories, but this is not yet part of a release.
I think it's still better to at least rename this nuke switch long-term, if not only leverage the fact you don't need to immediately destroy the contents of a directory marked for subvolume creation.

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/9ebcac3b5125a8b...

tmpfiles footgun, apply directly to the forehead

Posted Jun 16, 2024 16:03 UTC (Sun) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, a factory reset option should be named --factory-reset or something similar.

tmpfiles footgun, apply directly to the forehead

Posted Jun 16, 2024 17:02 UTC (Sun) by bluca (subscriber, #118303) [Link]

I didn't really add that for factory reset, although it could be useful for that too - I added that for packaging scriptlets so they can purge remains of data touched by a package. It's not run globally, but only using as input the tmpfiles.d provided by said package.