It’s actually not a bug, but obvious behavior.

    •  Dave.   ( @dgriffith@aussie.zone ) 
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      6 months ago

      The bug is the lack of documentation and that a simple unguarded command can erase all user’s data on the system.

      Also, the principle of least surprise would like a word.

      If I look at the command line arguments of a program called “systemd-tmpfiles” and one of them is called “purge” I will generally assume that option will purge temporary files.

      Now it turns out that someone decided that this program would be a simple way to do something with /home directories(*) so they included /home in the config file for the program, the file that the program reads by default when it is invoked.

      Who decided it would be a good idea for it to deal with /home?

      Wellllll…

      https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/tmpfiles.d/home.conf

      (*)I have no idea what this program is doing with /home in its config file. I will presume that there is a useful and mostly logical reason for it, and that this command line option was just an unfortunate footgun for those users who were not intimately familiar with systemd.

      • There were talks a few years ago about changing sd-tmpfiles name but it was decide not worth it due to the churn and bikeshedding it would cause.

        sd-tmpfiles is generally used to create, modify (e.g. permissions) and remove directories on the system. The home.conf is intended for systems that only ship /usr/ (e.g. containers) to create /home/ and /srv/ as a separate subvolume on btrfs