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I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

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Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#21

Post by piekvorst »

ofalkaed wrote: post #15

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breaka…

I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#23

Post by dietr1ch »

canadiantim wrote: post #19
dietr1ch wrote: post #2

I don't use Arch anymore, yet I still find myself reading their wiki from time to time. It's a phenomenal resource.

What are you using now?

NixOS. Having a config-defined system is a bit too different at first, but really nice when it comes to system reproducibility, and being able to roll back.

It made maintaining my laptop + workstations the "same" a breeze, although it took a bit to learn and settle into something that works for me. It seems today things are easier for newcomers, but Nix Flakes are still "experimental", and thus the documentation on things might seem confusing or misleading sometimes.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#24

Post by Semaphor »

piekvorst wrote: post #21
ofalkaed wrote: post #15

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breaka…

I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?

> This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet

That does sound significantly longer ago then 2016 ;)

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#25

Post by keysersoze33 »

ofalkaed wrote: post #15

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breaka…

I've contributed 32 edits (1 new page) in the past 10 years, so despite being stable, there are still many things to add and fix!

Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#26

Post by ofalkaed »

piekvorst wrote: post #21
ofalkaed wrote: post #15

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breaka…

I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?

This would be back in the 00s. I would guess that Arch got stable around 2010? I was using Slackware as my primary system by then so don't know exactly when it happened, someone else can probably fill in the details. I started using Arch when it was quite new, within the first year or two.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#27

Post by noufalibrahim »

I've never used Arch but I can really get the vibe here. Wikis (especially toopical ones) are social media of sorts. There was a strong community around the #emacs IRC channel and emacswiki.org back in the day. About a 100 people who knew each other quite well. And an Emacs bot that could read from the wiki (pre-modern RAG I suppose) and answer questions.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#29

Post by nextaccountic »

wpm wrote: post #16
nextaccountic wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately there's a trend lately where many newer cli tools don't have a man page. they put up a --help and think it suffices even though there are tools to automatically generate man pages those days

I should write a tool that converts help output to troff, even if the result wouldn't be as detailed and nice to read as a good man page it would save me the frustration of having to stab at "will i get usage docs with a -h, a --help, a -help, or running it with no args at all".

For Rust programs there's https://docs.rs/clap_mangen/0.2.31/clap_mangen/ that will generate a man page out of the help. (I am sure most programming languages have something like this). However, that's only useful if you are compiling the program (maybe distros could patch Rust programs to generate the man page during the build process)

A more general tool would be pretty good. Either for distros to call during build, after building the program proper; or for users to call.

If users are calling directly, it would be useful to, by default, show the regular man page if it exists, and only if it doesn't exist generate and display one out of --help. Also give it the same flags as man etc. In this case, we could do alias man=better_man and pretend this problem is already solved (but it's still better if distros generate it, so that they can display the man page on the web, etc)

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#30

Post by binsquare »

ofalkaed wrote: post #15

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breaka…

This brings back memories, same here!

I even bookmarked a page to remember how to rebuild the kernel because I can always expect it breaking.

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