Add a way to delete inodes

[bgilbert]

Feature Request

Environment

Any

Desired Feature

Add a way to remove existing files/directories/links.

Other Information

I don't have a use case in mind, and it's not clear that removal of a file shipped with the OS is a common operation. But it might be good to include this for completeness. The main use might be for overriding a parent config.

It doesn't really make sense to add a shouldExist property to each of files/directories/links, since deleting an inode shouldn't require knowing its type. But adding a list of whiteouts/things-to-delete also seems awkward.

I don't think this functionality is critical for 3.0.

[sohankunkerkar]

Any suggestions here to address this issue?
@bgilbert @arithx @jlebon @lucab

[sohankunkerkar]

One approach here (after discussing with @bgilbert ) would be to create a separate array of nodes to remove inodes. What other folks think about it?

[jdmarble]

Just offering up a use case for this feature. I'm attempting to disable systemd-resolved.service as described here. If I don't delete the symbolic link /etc/resolv.conf, then NetworkManager will not generate a functional version of it and DNS queries fail.

[bgilbert]

@jdmarble For that specific case, it's sufficient to replace the symlink with an empty file:

variant: fcos
version: 1.0.0
storage:
  files:
    - path: /etc/resolv.conf
systemd:
  units:
    - name: systemd-resolved.service
      mask: true