SystemD has something of a reputation for being a bunch of arrogant young engineers making fundamental changes to the long established status quo in order to solve clever problems that range from tiny-minority-edge-case to non-existent.
It’s an absolute classic anti-pattern any industry veteran would recognise. Your new-grad engineer, top of their class and incredibly smart, spends two weeks rewriting a core system in Idris without telling anyone.
So accordingly, I was delighted to see the following:
> [files in] systemd-homed home areas are now internally owned by the "nobody" user and dynamically mapped to the UID used locally.
> This makes migrating home areas between different systems cheaper because recursively chown()ing file system trees is no longer necessary.
All that to save a chown -R if I screw my drive into a new PC (or rebuild the current PC around it)?
If I move it to a non systemD system, you’ve just added the need to chown -R all my files because the new OS says they are all owned by nobody.
I don’t even believe for one moment that a recursive chown of 100k files takes any appreciable amount of time. Certainly not when it’s a one off. (5s for 66k files on my crappy VPS just now.)
In any case, the nobody user is a blunt but useful instrument for running daemons as a user that does not own any files. I don’t really want some janky daemon to run as a user which has write access to /home/gorgoiler.
[I have some guacamole prepared, to spread on my inedible but soon to be eaten hat, the moment someone links me to a diff showing the author of this change as Alan Cox.]
[Update: The hat and condiment survive, author is one L Poettering: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/cf5115f6e531c65bbb...
It’s an absolute classic anti-pattern any industry veteran would recognise. Your new-grad engineer, top of their class and incredibly smart, spends two weeks rewriting a core system in Idris without telling anyone.
So accordingly, I was delighted to see the following:
> [files in] systemd-homed home areas are now internally owned by the "nobody" user and dynamically mapped to the UID used locally.
> This makes migrating home areas between different systems cheaper because recursively chown()ing file system trees is no longer necessary.
All that to save a chown -R if I screw my drive into a new PC (or rebuild the current PC around it)?
If I move it to a non systemD system, you’ve just added the need to chown -R all my files because the new OS says they are all owned by nobody.
I don’t even believe for one moment that a recursive chown of 100k files takes any appreciable amount of time. Certainly not when it’s a one off. (5s for 66k files on my crappy VPS just now.)
In any case, the nobody user is a blunt but useful instrument for running daemons as a user that does not own any files. I don’t really want some janky daemon to run as a user which has write access to /home/gorgoiler.
[I have some guacamole prepared, to spread on my inedible but soon to be eaten hat, the moment someone links me to a diff showing the author of this change as Alan Cox.]
[Update: The hat and condiment survive, author is one L Poettering: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/cf5115f6e531c65bbb...