Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
this is a genuinely new idea on packaging but i am not at all certain it is a good one. in fact i am pretty sure it is crap. but it's fascinating and y'all should read it

http://www.andres-loeh.de/NixOS.pdf

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

Half the fun is figuring out who will get the next batch of death threats! We actually have an internal betting pool about which project will blow up next.

gnome 3 is terrible and you should transfer to a team where your work is meaningful to other people, e.g. actual users in the field and not hypothetical grandmas who love "activities"

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

gnome 3 is terrible and you should transfer to a team where your work is meaningful to other people, e.g. actual users in the field and not hypothetical grandmas who love "activities"

OK.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006

Greed is eternal posted:

install windows

install cygwin

do everything you'd do in linux but replace the commands 'apt-get' or 'yum' or 'pacman' with a nice GUI

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

this is a genuinely new idea on packaging but i am not at all certain it is a good one. in fact i am pretty sure it is crap. but it's fascinating and y'all should read it

http://www.andres-loeh.de/NixOS.pdf

NixOS was an inspiration for OSTree.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/OSTree
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/OSTree/NixOSComparison

http://blog.verbum.org/2014/01/21/ostree-in-action-rpm-ostree-and-switching-trees/
http://blog.verbum.org/2014/01/27/giving-a-name-to-your-root-filesystem/
http://blog.verbum.org/2014/02/26/ostree-rigorous-and-reliable-deployment/

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

this is very cool

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

quote:

I sometimes describe OSTree as being even more rigorous than traditional dpkg/rpm type package systems. Now, there are some of you out there who probably can’t imagine how that’s possible. You found packaging so tedious and painful that you gave up, and you now write Go code (because Google wrote it, it must be good, right?) and you hack on your MacBook from a coffee shop, and when you’re ready scp your statically linked binary to staging and then to production. Maybe you don’t even have staging. It’s so simple! Look how fast it is!

this is my current boss

and also nearly every person i ever worked with at a startup

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost

oh sure let's turn the entire filesystem into a massive chunk of global state that can only run one application at a time and also automatically diff-merge completely arbitrarily in /etc with no awareness of what's in there whatsoever

this doesn't sound like the most brittle pile of poo poo in the world

oh yeah let's also turn everything into massive monolithic one-size-fits-all images full of bloat applications written for like gtk1 ten years ago just scattered around wherever.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Mr Dog posted:

oh sure let's turn the entire filesystem into a massive chunk of global state that can only run one application at a time

Hm? How does OSTree do that?

Mr Dog posted:

and also automatically diff-merge completely arbitrarily in /etc with no awareness of what's in there whatsoever

You also misunderstand the purpose of the /etc merge. This page explains it a bit better:

http://blog.verbum.org/2014/01/24/why-ostree-requires-usretc/
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/OSTree/EverythingInEtcIsABug

It never does a content merge. It simply picks one of the three files wholesale.

The long-term goal is to have only administrator overrides in /etc. You should be able to boot a system without any /etc at all. Obviously, right now that's not possible, but OSTree ships a patch to turn /etc/passwd into /usr/share/passwd.

Really, with the UsrMerge, we've been moving to a fun new world:

  • /usr - for global, static data
  • /var - for global, persistent state
  • /run - for global, transient state
  • /etc - for administrator configuration override

Ideally, all configuration should be in dropfile folders e.g. /etc/foo.conf.d/. That's a lot more composable than trying to merge a giant configuration file rebased onto upstream.

https://developer.gnome.org/ostree/2014.2/layout.html

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
oh don't get me wrong the fhs refinements are definitely nice. / vs /usr and /sbin vs /bin distinctions are completely arbitrary and it's funny watching people bending backwards to retroactively contrive justifications for them when the real reason /usr exists is because that was the original name for /home and some influential unixbeards just ran out of space in their system drive and started putting poo poo in the home drive instead. but no it's "unix system resources" apparently.

why would you want /usr/share/passwd though? local accounts are site-specific configuration, and you kinda need to have at least one regular user (non-root) account on a system in order to do anything useful with it and still have at least marginally better security than windows xp. i thought /usr/share is for immutable resources used by applications anyway, is there going to be a preset list of system accounts? i guess you'd need to patch nss to have a hierarchical /etc/passwd resolution in that case.

Sapozhnik fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Mar 21, 2014

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Mr Dog posted:

why would you want /usr/share/passwd though? local accounts are site-specific configuration, and you kinda need to have at least one regular user (non-root) account on a system in order to do anything useful with it and still have at least marginally better security than windows xp. i thought /usr/share is for immutable resources used by applications anyway, is there going to be a preset list of system accounts? i guess you'd need to patch nss to have a hierarchical /etc/passwd resolution in that case.

/etc/passwd still exists for locally added accounts. Again, /etc/ is for site-specific configuration only. The system should not ship an /etc/passwd, it should be created when you add your first account.

For things like daemons which need their own users because they write their own files, that's what /usr/lib/passwd is for (I was wrong, it wasn't in /usr/share/, but there's really no difference between /usr/lib/ and /usr/share/).

Whether there's a root account in either /usr/lib/passwd or /etc/passwd is up to the system builder.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
And yes, we need to patch glibc.

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16142

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
the /etc and /usr/etc distinction is valuable and should have been done long ago in conventional package systems

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






I loving hate that kind of poo poo. I just want to have to look in one file, now it's two because it's "site specific"? gently caress that noise, 1 passwd file is absolutely fine.

Shaggar
Apr 26, 2006
the Linux filesystem layout is stupid

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

spankmeister posted:

I loving hate that kind of poo poo. I just want to have to look in one file, now it's two because it's "site specific"? gently caress that noise, 1 passwd file is absolutely fine.

files make bad databases, merging them is a pain in the rear end

if you ever need to edit config files from a script, and you don't use augeas, i will come to your home and damage your personal property

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Shaggar posted:

the Linux filesystem layout is stupid

yeah %SYSTEMROOT%/system32 makes way more sense than /bin, i'm glad microsoft cleared that up for all of us

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






Notorious b.s.d. posted:

files make bad databases, merging them is a pain in the rear end

if you ever need to edit config files from a script, and you don't use augeas, i will come to your home and damage your personal property

I use puppet for that so yes

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

spankmeister posted:

I loving hate that kind of poo poo. I just want to have to look in one file, now it's two because it's "site specific"? gently caress that noise, 1 passwd file is absolutely fine.

/etc/nsswitch.conf already fucks you up by making it flexible and dynamic so your user accounts can be done over with. To me, it makes perfect sense to separate out users that are actually users from users that are implementation details of the system.

And if you uninstall httpd, it doesn't try to read your /etc/passwd configuration automatically, it just generates a new "system" one.

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

the /etc and /usr/etc distinction is valuable and should have been done long ago in conventional package systems

Correct.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Shaggar posted:

the Linux filesystem layout is stupid

Agreed. That's why we're fixing it.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

files make bad databases, merging them is a pain in the rear end

if you ever need to edit config files from a script, and you don't use augeas, i will come to your home and damage your personal property

Don't edit config files from a script. augeas is the kind of distorted thinking that UNIX breeds. Dropfiles are excellent and don't require parsing config files.

DONT THREAD ON ME
Oct 1, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo
Floss Finder
linux is the bitcoin of the 90s

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

USSMICHELLEBACHMAN posted:

linux is the bitcoin of the 90s

it really was. people were super-excited about linux desktops killing off windows.

meanwhile, linux actually did kill off commercial unix. just fuckin steamrolled it. for some reason, this did not make a lot of magazine covers.

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

meanwhile, linux actually did kill off commercial unix. just fuckin steamrolled it. for some reason, this did not make a lot of magazine covers.

to be fair, that's because commercial unix was pretty much universally awful and expensive (and hilariously proprietary). no one wanted to use it, and everyone jumped ship the moment they had a chance (unlike what happened to windows).

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
windows steamrolled commercial unix too. $1,000 PCs with 4MB of RAM that could absolutely crush $20,000 SPARCs with 16MB were one hell of a competitive advantage back when Windows 95 came out. It was an abomination but Windows 95 was also Microsoft's greatest technical triumph.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
Windows 95 was a great operating system, developed by a talented crew who had a really good idea for good user interface design.

20 years later, most Linux users and developers haven't learned from the basic principles that made Windows 95 usable.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/26/120193.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/16/54648.aspx

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
And this is the part where Notorious B.S.D takes the bait to tell me how much GNOME 3 sucks.

The Management
Jan 2, 2010

sup, bitch?
windows 95 was entirely unusable with 4 MB of ram. 8 was a thrashfest, 16 was the point where it could actually switch between multiple programs without waiting 5 minutes

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

The Management posted:

windows 95 was entirely unusable with 4 MB of ram. 8 was a thrashfest, 16 was the point where it could actually switch between multiple programs without waiting 5 minutes

yeah he was conflating two eras.

there was legitimate competition between unix workstations and windows in the like 1990-1995 time frame.

for $5k you could buy a pc that ran windows 3.0 and loving flew, just an insanely fast system with great responsiveness.

for the same $5k, you could buy a unix desktop with literally 5x the CPU power. and it would take a half hour to boot. and another half hour to load a word processor. and 60 seconds every time you alt-tabbed.

unix didn't win

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

Windows 95 was a great operating system, developed by a talented crew who had a really good idea for good user interface design.

20 years later, most Linux users and developers haven't learned from the basic principles that made Windows 95 usable.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/26/120193.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/16/54648.aspx

Suspicious Dish posted:

And this is the part where Notorious B.S.D takes the bait to tell me how much GNOME 3 sucks.

no, i am pretty sure you figured out the cruel irony for yourself

i guess i still gotta spell it out for everyone else: praising windows 95 and quoting the old new thing while actively working on a desktop that defies user expectations and omits critical features from windows 95 is pretty loving lol

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

no, i am pretty sure you figured out the cruel irony for yourself

i guess i still gotta spell it out for everyone else: praising windows 95 and quoting the old new thing while actively working on a desktop that defies user expectations and omits critical features from windows 95 is pretty loving lol

I've asked you many times what you think is wrong with GNOME 3 and you've never been able to give me any feedback. I've actually gotten more useful feedback from Shaggar.

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






Probably a really bad idea to get ui design and development advice from yospos

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

I've asked you many times what you think is wrong with GNOME 3 and you've never been able to give me any feedback. I've actually gotten more useful feedback from Shaggar.

where's the taskbar?
where is the fd.o notification area?

you know, those win95 metaphors that were tailored to users and not to someone's platonic ideal of god knows what

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
the other reason i don't comment very much on gnome 3's concrete failures is that i no longer give a poo poo. the birthing process was so god drat ugly that there's very little reason to revisit old decisions. i don't have a list of all the reasons it was bad, but it was so loving terrible it drove me away from software i had been using for a decade

i abandoned the platform entirely. there is exactly one gtk app i still use, and it's gtk2.

this is true of everyone else i know, and go figure, as an old timey unix systems guy i know a lot of fuckin unix desktop users. they're not on gnome anymore

edit: oh yeah i forgot to mention. someone closed the bug i was interested in for gtk3. i don't know if they actually fixed it, but they closed it, deciding it was no longer relevant. four years to maybe-fix a bug ain't bad, right? (i am not going to install a gtk3 application in order to find out if it's fixed.)

Notorious b.s.d. fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Mar 21, 2014

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

you know, those win95 metaphors that were tailored to users and not to someone's platonic ideal of god knows what

I was praising Windows 95 for its adherence to a user research methodology rather than sticking to some dogma about what worked in the past.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

I was praising Windows 95 for its adherence to a user research methodology rather than sticking to some dogma about what worked in the past.

i admire your parsimony but it's not helpful here

unfortunately it's no longer 1995, and there is now a userbase of literal billions of people who expect things to work in a certain way. you're not working on fresh canvas and you don't have hundreds of millions to spend on an ad campaign

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
I'm sure exactly 0 people use OS X, iOS or Android because it does not work the way Windows does.

infernal machines
Oct 11, 2012

we have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self.
most of the old timey unix guys i've met are loving awful.

the kind of people that try to convince small businesses that sendmail and built-from-scratch freeBSD servers are the right choice for their ten person office. the hilarious part, is given the chance, they manage to gently caress that up too.

they're all "consultants" that haven't had a contract since the mid 90s and don't seem to realize that anything has changed.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

infernal machines posted:

most of the old timey unix guys i've met are loving awful.

the kind of people that try to convince small businesses that sendmail and built-from-scratch freeBSD servers are the right choice for their ten person office. the hilarious part, is given the chance, they manage to gently caress that up too.

they're all "consultants" that haven't had a contract since the mid 90s and don't seem to realize that anything has changed.

i know at least two guys who fit this description perfectly

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

I'm sure exactly 0 people use OS X, iOS or Android because it does not work the way Windows does.

osx ui is also loving terrible

but they have lots of money to convince people it's not. it amazes me anyone can put up with that bullshit for more than an hour

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply