Earlier quoted context omitted.
10+ years ago, a MS dev inserted a hex constant B16B00B5 into the linux kernel and caused a fight.
True story: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/b16b00b5/amp
They could have changed the number to decimal problem solved.
Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
211–220 of 242 posts
Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of all the Linux package managers (sans 'frontends/wrappers'), RPM is probably the least horrible.
I like Arch’s pacman the best.
You should take a look at xbps, used by Void Linux. It's extremely similar in speed and interface, but tracks shared library dependencies and so supports partial updates. xbps-src, roughly equivalent to Arch's makepkg, statelessly builds packages in a chroot which, when writing "templates" (PKGBUILDs), helps make sure you haven't missed any build dependencies simply because they happen to be installed on your system.
Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#213I must be the only one in the world not intrigued and excited by an incredibly boring server distro, barely different from Debian, that happens to be made by the Microsoft cloud Linux server department. Am I really missing something?
Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but Debian’s package repository is all deb based. It would be difficult to translate precisely into RPM - they have different tooling and semantics.
There does exist a conversion tool between them: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(file_converter)
The idea of building a whole distro on alien is pretty laughable. Besides, for making a whole distro, what you want to convert between is the source packages, not the binary packages they produce, which is typically (always?) what alien is used for.
Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Visual Studio Code is a massive gift to the community. If we take it in a different direction than Microsoft wants, that would be us doing what you are accusing them of. We can do what we want though. So can they. That’s Open Source! The CoPilot thing is new and troubling.
> So can they. That’s Open Source! Well, it's a very tiny detail, but VSCode proper is not open source, and you can't built VSCode proper from the available source out there.
It's not a tiny detail. ‘VSCode proper’ includes integration with the extension marketplace that everyone expects to use, as well as exclusive access to proprietary, Microsoft-backed extensions which are widely used throughout the VSCode userbase for essential functionality.
Microsoft has arranged things so that actual open-source builds of VSCodium will always be lacking in comparison to their proprietary product.
Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So can they. That’s Open Source! Well, it's a very tiny detail, but VSCode proper is not open source, and you can't built VSCode proper from the available source out there.
It's not a tiny detail. ‘VSCode proper’ includes integration with the extension marketplace that everyone expects to use, as well as exclusive access to proprietary, Microsoft-backed extensions which are widely used throughout the VSCode userbase for essential functionality. Microsoft has arranged things so that actual open-source builds of VSCodium will always be lacking in comparison to their proprietary product.
> Microsoft has arranged things so that actual open-source builds of VSCodium will always be lacking in comparison to their proprietary product.
Errm, this is also my point, written in a slightly ironic form.
This is why I use neither, too.
Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The use of RPM though is IMO a bad choice and one that lets me know that it is very unlikely that this would ever become a major distro for Microsoft. reply Interesting take. Care to elaborate?
RPM is antiquated. New package managers like apk & pacman have had great success due to their simplicity and attracting a lot of maintainers that are able to maintain more stable packages than other distros.
This is totally false, and compares package managers in incomparable categories (pacman's counterparts in the RPM-based package management world are Zypper and dnf, not rpm).
Arch Linux itself has very few packages— ~10k, around half of what you find Fedora, an RPM-based distro. The DEB packaging format and tools related to it are way more convoluted, and still Debian has several times as many packages as Arch and many, many more maintainers than Arch does.
The only area where the Arch community sees more contributors for packages is the AUR, where contributors are decidedly not maintainers, package quality is low, and packages are not stable. (And users face this in addition to the whole basic integration problem with source-based packages and packages installed via binary repos, of which only the latter is ever considered by pacman's dep solver during upgrades.)
Users like pacman because it's fast. It's not nearly robust enough for use at serious scale. Cutting corners is how it gets that speed.
Alpine's apk is just another lightweight cousin of dpkg that incorporates some higher-level dependency resolution in a barebones way, like ipkg and opkg, like are used on embedded systems or OpenWRT or whatever. It's not some maintainer magnet which has multiplied the (pretty tiny) Alpine repos (which don't even include, for example, a JVM).
Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably presenting a code editor with IDE like extensions that are all Open Source, and then gradually killing the Open Source extensions and switching them out for proprietary ones.
Which is exactly the EEE technique, “patented” by Microsoft: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu... If GitHub, VS code, an MS Linux, and perhaps somehow LinkedIn, prove to be a joint front to EEE the F/OSS community, what can I say... Seems somewhat unlikely though, given the number of allowances that must be made for that to hold true.
Well Github is struggling to not abuse its Free Software users, VS Code has failed to remain Open Source, I'm not sure about LinkedIn because that never pretended to heart Linux so that gets a pass, and MS Linux isn't really a thing.
Although if you are to believe the terrible kernel commits they were attempting to make to allow them to do an Nvidia closed source shim then it wouldn't shock me.
Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#219Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a tiny detail. ‘VSCode proper’ includes integration with the extension marketplace that everyone expects to use, as well as exclusive access to proprietary, Microsoft-backed extensions which are widely used throughout the VSCode userbase for essential functionality. Microsoft has arranged things so that actual open-source builds of VSCodium will always be lacking in comparison to their proprietary product.
> Microsoft has arranged things so that actual open-source builds of VSCodium will always be lacking in comparison to their proprietary product. Errm, this is also my point, written in a slightly ironic form. This is why I use neither, too.
Oh, my apologies! I'm not tuned properly to pick up irony about that on HN since I've read so many posts overlooking the real difference. Hopefully my comment will be useful as a starting point to someone who hasn't really looked into the issue before.