Some of Lennart's inventions that he presents at conferences seem to lose momentum soon after. A while ago he talked about casync and mkosi. Both of these seemed more interesting to me than this but progress seem slow or stalled. We will see what becomes of this, but I don't think it is a slam dunk and what everyone has always needed but never realized. I think by ruling out remote /server use cases he will limit the interest in it.
Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]
#12I'm going to pass on this one. How is /etc not 'extensible'? You just add a new file to the directory. Reinventing the windows registry, but this time in JSON, is a lateral move that is only going to complicate maintaining systems. For user level configuration, you already have too many competing mechanisms for doing this already, and this one requires systemd level integration making it much more coupled to the oper…
> I'm going to pass on this one. How is /etc not 'extensible'?
Without commenting on systemd-homed, since I haven't watched the talk yet; regular users can't modify /etc. Granted, most applications have user local configuration or a command line option to specify a config file, but not all. That said, I suppose you could always user namespace overlay mount a custom directory over /etc to add custom files to it.
Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]
#13I'm going to pass on this one. How is /etc not 'extensible'? You just add a new file to the directory. Reinventing the windows registry, but this time in JSON, is a lateral move that is only going to complicate maintaining systems. For user level configuration, you already have too many competing mechanisms for doing this already, and this one requires systemd level integration making it much more coupled to the oper…
> I'm going to pass on this one. How is /etc not 'extensible'? Without commenting on systemd-homed, since I haven't watched the talk yet; regular users can't modify /etc. Granted, most applications have user local configuration or a command line option to specify a config file, but not all. That said, I suppose you could always user namespace overlay mount a custom directory over /etc to add custom files to it.
The common pattern is to have some system wide file in /etc or /usr/share that is used by default, and allowing the user to override this with a dot-file in their home directory or passing in a config file as a optional argument.
What is being proposed obliterates most of the workflows that people are use to: editing configuration files in the editor of the user's choice and then having the option of using normal backup or using source code repository tools to maintain and version them. Instead, we have the same windows registry mechanism, with some modern flourishes, that most people have ridiculed Microsoft for decades over.
As a user, I can 'strace -e open' and see what locations my program is trying to open. This is very helpful for what configuration data is being read. Everything is a file, and every file operation is a syscall. As a developer, JSON isn't appropriate for every kind of application.
Re: Reinventing Home Directories – systemd-homed [pdf]
#14I am not comfortable with the feature creep that systemd is slowing bringing in. binfmt mount executing files based on a lookup, similar to windows assoc, intercepting gethostbyname(), this really feels like an attempt to shim old vulnerable windows concepts into linux. I am concerned that linux will not be recognizable in the near future and will be subject to bloat and obfuscation. What would it take to make this s…
Gentoo. We avoid these issues, you pick what ever init system you want. If it's not in the tree, add it to your overlay.