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APT Rust requirement raises questions

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Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#431

Post by radlad »

phicoh wrote: post #419
radlad wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

systemd has been the de facto standard for over a decade now and is very stable. I have found that even most people who complained about the initial transition are very welcoming of its benefits now.

Depends a bit on how you define systemd. Just found out that the systemd developers don't understand DNS (or IPv6). Interesting problems result from that.

> Just found out that the systemd developers don't understand DNS (or IPv6).

Just according to Github, systemd has over 2,300 contributors. Which ones are you referring to?

And more to the point, what is this supposed to mean? Did you encounter a bug or something? DNS on Linux is sort of famously a tire fire, see for example https://tailscale.com/blog/sisyphean-dns-client-linux ... IPv6 networking is also famously difficult on Linux, with many users still refusing to even leave it enabled, frustratingly for those of us who care about IPv6.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#432

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ForHackernews wrote: post #430
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So anyways, here's the netbsd docs for running the latest release on VAX: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/vax/

Obscure retro OS runs on obscure retro hardware you say?

NetBSD isn't a retro OS, nor is it particularly obscure. (For that matter, VAX isn't obscure, though it's very retro.)

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#433

Post by GoblinSlayer »

steveklabnik wrote: post #413
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that angle brackets are semantics dependent syntax. Whether they are brackets or not depends on semantic context. Conversely square brackets are always brackets.

Square brackets would be semantically dependent if they appeared in the same position of angle brackets. There's nothing magical about [] that makes the problems with disappear.

It disappears the problem that angle brackets are sometimes not brackets. I.e. ac is parsed as (ac or as (a())c.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#434

Post by GoblinSlayer »

kstrauser wrote: post #426
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that angle brackets are semantics dependent syntax. Whether they are brackets or not depends on semantic context. Conversely square brackets are always brackets.

So that’s the Specificth element of Generic?

It's Brackets(Generic,Specific).

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#435

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

powerclue wrote: post #414
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of us abandoned commercial OSs for Debian precisely to escape that mentality.

I think that's reasonable, but surely there's a limit? Like, if one user exists on an old piece of tech, does Debian need to support them forever? I think this is a nuanced call, personally, and I think there's some room for disagreements here. I just happen to believe that maybe the right decision is to fork at some point and spin off legacy forks when there's a vanishingly small suite of things that cause friction…

That's fair. There's even precedent in the form of e.g. https://archlinux32.org/ , though I personally view that kind of fracturing as undesirable. Personally I'd rather lean the other way; if folks want to be forward-thinking at the expense of breaking compatibility, they could just go work on Fedora or Arch or any other distro that wants to be the future instead of "the universal operating system".

In this particular case, though, I would specifically argue that it's a poor trade-off; AIUI, the whole thing comes down to a tiny bit of functionality that shouldn't even be in core apt, that is of little use to most of the community, and that really should be factored out into an optional additional package anyways, at which point it need not affect less popular ports.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#436

Post by rrmm »

krior wrote: post #402
rrmm wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to introduce certain common vulnerabilities ... not vulnerabilities in general.

And seatbelts and airbags do not prevent all harm, yet they are still universally used.

It's a pedantic point admittedly, but I think it's important to be realistic and clear that Rust isn't a panacea.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#437

Post by xscott »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #433
steveklabnik wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Square brackets would be semantically dependent if they appeared in the same position of angle brackets. There's nothing magical about [] that makes the problems with disappear.

It disappears the problem that angle brackets are sometimes not brackets. I.e. a c is parsed as (a c or as (a( ))c.

It also comes up when you want compile time expressions as parameters to your generics:

    // nice and clean
    let a = Generic[T, A > B]::new(); 

    // gross curlies needed because of poor choices
    let a = Generic:: B}>::new();

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#438

Post by pornel »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #42
fn-mote wrote: post #20

The most interesting criticism / idea in the article was that the parts that are intended for Rust-ification should actually be removed from core apt. > it would be better to remove the code that is used to parse the .deb, .ar, and .tar formats [...] from APT entirely. It is only needed for two tools, apt-ftparchive and apt-extracttemplates [...] Another interesting, although perhaps tangential, criticism was that th…

Given that Cargo is written in Rust, you would think there would be at least one battle tested solver that could be used. Perhaps it was harder to extract and make generic than write a new one?

Cargo isn't satisfied with its own solver either. Solvers are a hard and messy problem.

The problem is theoretically NP complete (a SAT solver), but even harder than that: users also care about picking solutions that optimize for multiple criteria like minimal changes, more recent versions, minimal duplication (if multiple versions can coexist), all while having easy-to-understand errors when dependencies can't be satisfied, and with better-than-NP performance. It ends up being complex and full of compromises.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#439

Post by aeve890 »

theoldgreybeard wrote: post #177

Rust developers are so dogmatic about their way being the best and only way that I just avoid it altogether. I've had people ask about Rust in issues/discussions in small hobby projects I released as open source - I just ban them immediately because there is no reasoning with them and they never give up. Open source terrorists.

Username checks out.

>Open source terrorists

Rust users and evangelism rubs me the wrong way. Yes it's safe, yes it's ergonomic but why the weird aura around the people that insist in "Rewrite it in Rust, Deus Vult"? It eludes me.

Re: APT Rust requirement raises questions

#440

Post by ForHackernews »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #432
ForHackernews wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obscure retro OS runs on obscure retro hardware you say?

NetBSD isn't a retro OS, nor is it particularly obscure. (For that matter, VAX isn't obscure, though it's very retro.)

Maybe not for hacker news. In the real world, it's plenty obscure. Poll your family at Thanksgiving.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-netbsd

> NetBSD is used by less than 0.1% of all the websites whose operating system we know.

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