Systemd-homed: Systemd Now Working To Improve Home Directory Handling

[waxhead]

Well I actually like the changes that systemd has introduced , but I am not so sure about this one. As far as I understand from a quick look at the slides both concepts wants your home directory to be a image file. Am I understanding it correctly that homed don't allow for a standard directory anymore?

[ssokolow]

I like the proposed features, but I'm not a fan of JSON for storing user records. It's not sufficiently in line with the UNIX ethos of ensuring that this sort of data is friendly for human editing in case of trouble.

Assuming support for hierarchical records is the reason they're not using more traditional Unixy metaformats, TOML would be better for that.

[miabrahams]

I like the proposed features, but I'm not a fan of JSON for storing user records. It's not sufficiently in line with the UNIX ethos of ensuring that this sort of data is friendly for human editing in case of trouble.

Assuming support for hierarchical records is the reason they're not using more traditional Unixy metaformats, TOML would be better for that.

JSON is just fine for manual editing. I have no difficulty editing my VS Code config by hand. On top of the rich type system, there is a parsing library available, often included in the stdlib, for nearly every programming language.

[rhavenn]

Yeah, no. systemd should stay in /etc, /usr and related OS level stuff. Stay out of my home directory. I've had more or less the same .cshrc and .login file since the late 90s with some tweaks here and there to add / remove aliases / whatever. No problem moving that between Linux / FreeBSD servers, laptops, and desktops. A couple of shell scripts to create tarballs of various directories and config files, sync them off via a cron job and voila, Bob's your uncle. At anytime I have more or less the same set of basic configs, PGP keys, SSH related files, and some "local" data available to me via single script call. I could get fancy and use git, but haven't really seen the need.

[Britoid]

This actually makes a lot of sense and I feel like Lennard should stop naming things after systemd otherwise people will hate it for no reason.

the /etc/passwd /etc/shadow stuff is ridiculously outdated. macOS has moved away from it too.

Arguably this also makes /var/lib/AccountService redundant.

[skeevy420]

Yeah, no. systemd should stay in /etc, /usr and related OS level stuff. Stay out of my home directory. I've had more or less the same .cshrc and .login file since the late 90s with some tweaks here and there to add / remove aliases / whatever. No problem moving that between Linux / FreeBSD servers, laptops, and desktops. A couple of shell scripts to create tarballs of various directories and config files, sync them off via a cron job and viola, Bob's your uncle. At anytime I have more or less the same set of basic configs, PGP keys, SSH related files, and some "local" data available to me via single script call. I could get fancy and use git, but haven't really seen the need.

For me or you, sure, that's a fine method. For the average jackass....what's a shell script and why do I need to be able to play a viola?

[rhavenn]

For me or you, sure, that's a fine method. For the average jackass....what's a shell script and why do I need to be able to play a viola?

Good point. You wouldn't need to play a viola if I spelled it right. Yeah, I get it, but if this was a big concern Ubuntu et all could also build some cloud sync tool to keep all your settings, etc... It's not like the current format of config files is crazy complicated. I mean, adopting 'homed' would just force applications that use it to move into a defined "box", but they should, technically, already be doing that with the LFS standards. Backing up .config and .local and a couple of other key directories and you'd get most of what you need.

[F.Ultra]

I'll never be using a feature that will potentially lock my data in case of bugs for ever.

So in essence you don't use computers at all.

[Neraxa]

This sounds good, and I am glad to hear that new features and capabilities are being added to systemd to add more power and flexibility to the Linux environment which users can utilize. I am looking forward to seeing all of these great new features in action and many more to come. Keep up the good work, Lennart, it is much appreciated.

Another feature I would like to see is improved freezing to disk of single processes to disk, which can be later unfrozen, even after system reboot. Very interesting feature with interesting possibilities.

[finalzone]

@Bitroid Then some people will complain systemd does follow UNIX nomenclature.