Initially the bug report was shot down by systemd developer Luca Boccassi of Microsoft with:
So an option that is literally documented as saying “all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d/ entry will be deleted”, that you knew nothing about, sounded like a “good idea”? Did you even go and look what tmpfiles.d entries you had beforehand?
Maybe don’t just run random commands that you know nothing about, while ignoring what the documentation tells you? Just a thought eh"
Good devs, good product, I’m really excited about out shitty, shitty future.
I thought the same, surely some distribution messed up.
They didn’t. Systemd ships this file as /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/home.conf. That is a valid configuration directory, the lowest priority, and not just an example.
Basically it would only take effect in certain scenarios, and in most distributions it is doing nothing. Except when someone ran purge and it cleared files it had no hand in creating.
So yeah, this was actually a big issue.