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.
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.
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