[Nottingham] systemd to set defaults (Re: *nix most dangerous command line commands...)

[Martin]

On 20/06/14 09:27, Jason Irwin wrote:
> On 13/06/14 17:05, RICHARD SMEDLEY wrote:
>>> rm -r *
>>> End of operating system......
>> The classic tale of recovering from this comes from Manchester:
>> http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/hack/recovery.html
> Soon to be a thing of the past?
> 
> https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/AU5KpyGTZHL

####
Minimal Fedora installation with:
  /usr/share/factory/
and
  $ rm -rf /etc/* /var/*
support.
####


Hardly...

The normal system permissions should protect those areas from a user
doing a "rm -Rf". If you are root and do that, then you deserve the
power of god to be so silly.


All that is doing is moving the task of setting the defaults for
installed apps to (yet another grab by?) systemd...

However, I think that is badly misplaced and uncooperative.

Far far better is to convince the apps authors that their apps should
repopulate missing defaults files, or better yet be able to sensibly
work without any such files in the first place.

With that, you could have a clean /etc whereby the only files there are
minimally whatever is needed to set overrides to the app defaults.

Note also that /etc provides a valuable function of "self-documenting"
how a system has been set up.


A better option could be for systemd to keep snapshots of whatever is of
interest to systemd and be able to roll back to a known good
configuration. But with that, what happens when something is
deliberately removed?...


To my mind, is systemd heading towards the Windows way of assuming *all*
users are idiots? ... Rather than offering sensible routes to better
design the system and educate the users where appropriate.


All a game of arrogance? Narrow focus? Too much haste? Or?...

Misplaced design?...


I'm sure I'm one of the first to exclaim that some of the /etc configs
should be a lot better designed for ease of use and maintainability.
However, hiding those details can be a recipe for much silliness if the
user cannot see exactly what is happening or if 'surprising things'
happen...


Cheers,
Martin


-- 
- ------------------ - ----------------------------------------
-    Martin Lomas    - OpenPGP (GPG/PGP) Public Key: 0xCEE1D3B7
- martin @ ml1 co uk - Import from   hkp://subkeys.pgp.net   or
- ------------------ - http:// ml1 .co .uk/martin_ml1_co_uk.gpg