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I wish they didn’t just take the well established name of a principle and re use it in their distro-name. As much as I appreciate this initiative I think they should consider the importance of naming and branding. An original product should have an original name.
How does this compare with LFS (Linux from Scratch)? Is it an example of the suckless philosophy?(suckless.org) Inquiring minds want to know!
BLFS adds specific desirable bits.
But neither LFS nor BLFS offers a yum/apt/emerge package management facility for dropping in large functionality and keeping rhe dependency graphs of the components in check.
>An independent Linux(R) distribution with a focus on simplicity and the concept of less is more. For me, this niche has always been filled by the venerable Slackware distro.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, and in fact I'd prefer it if that was the mainstream definition. Given that it isn't, there may be better replacements for the headline, along the lines of "maintainable by one person".
That alternative definition seems less useful, because quite often there are two people who can individually maintain a project, and in that scenario the bus factor is 0 even though there is a risk that both of them will leave the project.
> The distribution is designed to be maintainable by a single person. There is no infrastructure and the entire distribution is merely a few Git repositories. A very clever approach, mirroring the way FreeBSD, OpenBSD have traditionally managed their core competencies. I am a lifelong Debian fan but it has always troubled me that I can’t check out a copy of the OS’s metadata — that which is packaged in all of the DSC…
> BUS FACTOR OF ZERO Bus factor is usually defined as the minimum number of team members that have to be hit by a bus to put the project in jeopardy. The Wikipedia article linked from the site defines it the same way. So a bus factor of zero would mean that the project is in jeopardy even if all the maintainers are alive.
> So a bus factor of zero would mean that the project is in jeopardy even if all the maintainers are alive. So, PHP, then.
It is (or at least originally was) certainly not the pinnacle of good design.
The packageformat is entirely static. A series of plain-text files with fields separated by lines and spaces. Easily parseable via any programming language or with basic UNIX utilities.
Please just stick to well-known formats (even if you don't like them) and make your fellow developers life easier! For example, everyone hates YAML for one reason or another, but if you use it, you are using a format everyone is familiar with it. We know it's terrible quirks, but still well known and every language has parsers for it.
>An independent Linux(R) distribution with a focus on simplicity and the concept of less is more. For me, this niche has always been filled by the venerable Slackware distro.
Slackware is a complete OS complete with curated set of user land and desktop applications. Although I have a soft spot for Slackware, I’d say arch fills this niche more than Slack: You get the most minimal system as a starting point and build what complexity you need on top - and no more.
What I found interesting is that it doesn't use initramfs. Can someone elaborate on that? Is that something other distros should adopt?
I don't think there’s really much of a reason to abandon initramfs other than “maybe you don’t need it.” As far as I can tell, this distro has you compiling the kernel. If you are compiling kernel for your specific hardware, you can remove the need for kernel modules in initramfs. Distros generally compile the kernel for you, so this won’t work so well, in general.
Add weasel words to the above as necessary. Basically, no major advantages to ditching initramfs, and ditching it will leave you with something less flexible. Some use cases (e.g. embedded) there may be no advantage to using initramfs in the first place.