I recently upgraded from f35 → f36 and noticed a few days later that a backup job I had created hasn’t been running. Digging deeper it appears that the systemd unit and timer files don’t exist in my $HOME anymore.
So that’s weird because I’m sure the xxx.timer and xxx.service files had been installed and operational prior to the upgrade. The backups serve as evidence they last ran just prior to the upgrade.
Another oddity is that I don’t even seem to have a systemd config directory in $HOME anymore. I believe it used to live at ~/.config/systemd but that dir doesn’t exist.
I Googled a bit but didn’t see anything in the F36 notes about changes to systemd user configs. Did I miss something? Did this configuration move to a new location?
The upgrade will not touch your home folder at all—rpm/dnf simply don’t function there, they only touch system files. So the files should exist in ~/.config.
For example, I have a syncthing.service file in my ~/.config/systemd/user/default.target.wants/ folder, which is still there after the upgrade (as are all my other files).
Even if the location had changed, rpm/dnf would not touch these files.
So: have you run any cleanups that may have removed any files? Are the other config files still there? Is this the same user you were using before? (lots of possibilities currently)
I’m not sure tbh—this is an odd one. I really can’t think of a scenario where something would delete user files
What were these files, did they belong to a package for example, or did you write them yourself? Are you sure they were user systemd files, and not perhaps system ones (which, of course, would be overwritten by any package updates unless they are marked as configuration files in /etc)
They were handwritten by me and manually installed. Part of the reason I’m nearly certain they were installed to my homedir is because the service sets an environment variable relative to ‘%h’. This file exists in ~bfallik but not ~root. So they never would have worked had they been installed in /etc/systemd/system.
Also, I manually installed them by copying them into place. I never wrote code to automate this so there isn’t any code that would have uninstalled them either.
Is it possible that toolbox could be the cause? It’s likely that I installed these units while inside a toolbox container. But toolbox mounts my homedir inside the container so I would have assumed these changes would be expressed to the host. Is it possible that homedir changes made while inside the toolbox container are somehow reverted when the container is deleted? Seems like a long shot but I’m out of other ideas.
I asked the toolbox folks and they confirmed it could not have been what caused my homedir configs to disappear. I’m out of ideas about what might have happened. =/
I’m at a loss too. I can’t think of anything that would remove files in ~/.config, I can’t find anything that suggests a systemd update would remove user systemd files either.
