[arch-general] Location of the pacman database

[Leonid Isaev]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 12:53:40AM +0200, Nowaker wrote:
> Good point. I just did `pacman -Ql |grep -F ' /var'` to see how many
> files there are. 99.7% of them are directories only, though. Are
> tmpfiles.d supposed to create directories in /var too? Docs mention
> using tmpfiles.d to init /tmp or /run, not /var though. But I guess
> stateless systemd would always provide tmpfiles for that.

Yes, those are mostly dirs. And you can't create them through tmpfiles because
it's going to be a mess. But breaking pacman -Qk is relatively harmless, the
bigger question is what to do with all the files in var (e.g. exim mailspools)?
Wiping /var is not an option on a workstation/server and is OK only in special
cases, like kiosk-type systems or Fedora installations (which are broken by
default anyway) :).

AFAIK, this has not been publicly discussed on systemd-devel.

> > What about pacman keyring? Also note that your custom keys should
> > be packaged as well and resigned on-boot.
> 
> I wasn't aware of that. I only refer to what the OP requested and that
> didn't sound complicated at all. Now it does.

Of course, depending on your paranoia (and amount of free time), you can ask
whether keyring should be shared among snapshots and similar questions...

> Please note I'm not a huge fan of systemd. I'd rather Arch hadn't
> married systemd back then. But since it has already happened, many
> parts of Arch make use of systemd (e.g. netctl), there are several
> systemd contributors amongst Arch Linux developers, it'd be good to
> make use of various systemd features. As long as they are not costly
> to implement, of course. And this "factory reset" feature indeed seems
> to be costly.

systemd's factory reset and atomic upgrades were explicitly stated to be useful
only in special situations, like embedded systems. Just because Archlinux
systemd package enables them doesn't mean that the entire distribution should
be change around.

Implementation is easy, support in all usecases is hard. I mean, Archlinux is
not CoreOS...

Cheers,
-- 
Leonid Isaev
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