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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

#51

Post by VorpalWay »

bdavbdav wrote: post #46
keysersoze33 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They may be preferred, but in a lot of cases they’re pretty terrible. I had a bit of a heated debate with ChatGPT about the best way to restore a broken strange mdadm setup. It was very confidently wrong, and battled its point until I posted terminal output. Sometimes I feel it’s learnt from the more belligerent side of OSS maintenance!

Why would you bother arguing with an LLM? If you know the answer, just walk away and have a better day. It is not like it will learn from your interaction.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#52

Post by VorpalWay »

doubled112 wrote: post #35
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…

> Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly I believe this to be the entire ecosystem, not just Arch. It's been a long while since something like moving to 64bit happened. Or swapping out init systems.

Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg.

I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto.

(I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#53

Post by Ferret7446 »

nextaccountic wrote: post #11
mahmedtan wrote: post #4

I also find myself using https://man.archlinux.org/ a lot. It's much more readable/user-friendly than https://man7.org plus it contains man-pages from their `extra` repo which contains a lot of popular oss tooling.

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

Because installing a man page requires root and a writeable root fs for that matter

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#54

Post by VorpalWay »

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".

This already exists: https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/help2man/help2man.1.en

It does expect quite particular format for --help though iirc if you want a good result. It predates the AI craze by a good 20 years, so it reliably either works or doesn't.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#55

Post by ashikns »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #27

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.

Arch wiki is something special. It is astounding how diverse and detailed (and yet concise) it is.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#57

Post by shevy-java »

The ArchWiki is indeed pretty good. I used to prefer the gentoo wiki back in the days but I think the ArchWiki may be better at this point in time.

It's also interesting to see that many other Linux distributions fail to have any wiki at all, yet alone one that has high quality content. This is especially frustrating because Google search got so worse now that finding resources is hard. I tried to explain this problem to different projects in general; in particular ruby-based projects tend to have really low quality documentation (with some exceptions, e. g. Jeremy Evans projects tend to have good quality documentation usually, but that is a minority if you look at all the ruby projects - even popular ones such as rack, ruby-wasm or ruby opal; horrible quality or not even any real quality at all. And then rubyists wonder why they lost to python ...)

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#58

Post by VorpalWay »

razemio wrote: post #47
noufalibrahim wrote: post #27

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.

I think with arch wiki it is even more than that. Before I switched to arch back then, you would consult the arch wiki for an unrelated distro, because it was (is) that good. Even the aur repository helps you alot, by checking the raw scripts, how to compile stuff. I can't make a good example but it feeled like reading vi specific wiki that helped you with plugin development for emacs.

AUR is particularly useful because Arch has really simple build scripts. They are bash with some particular function names that you need to define (like "build" and "check") and a few bits of package metadata in variables. Pretty intelligible even if you don't know the format beforehand.

Contrast that with Debian build scripts which I never managed to figure out. It's dozens of layers of helpers for "common cases" with lots of Makefile magic. Completely inscrutable if you aren't already a Debian package maintainer. Very compact though.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#59

Post by ofalkaed »

benoliver999 wrote: post #50
piekvorst wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The switch to systemd is the last time I FUBARed my system. 2012 it looks like?? I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing.

Systemd was the end of Arch for me, my rarely used Arch install was massively broken by its first update in ~6 months largely because of systemd. With some work I got things sorted out and working again only to fall into a cycle of breaking the system as I discovered that systemd was very different from what I was used to and did not like me treating it like SysV. Going 6 months without updates would most likely have caused issues with Arch regardless of how stable it had gotten even without the systemd change, but my subsequent and repeated breaking of the system made me realize I no longer had any interest in learning new system stuff, I just wanted a system that would stay out of my way and let me do the things I wanted to use the system for.

I do miss Arch but there is no way I am going to keep up with updates, I will do them when I discover I can't install anything new and then things will break because it has been so long since my last update. Slackware is far more suited to my nature but it will never be Arch.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#60

Post by shevy-java »

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 learned linux on debian first. The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) was not working so I had to use the commandline. I had a short debian handbook and worked through it slowly. Before that I had SUSE and a SUSE handbook with a GUI, which was totally useless. I then went on to use knoppix, kanotix, sidux, GoboLinux, eventually ended up with slackware. These days I tend to use manjaro, despite the drawback that is systemd. Manjaro kind of feels like a mix between arch and slackware. (I compile from source, so I only need a base really for the most part, excluding a few things; I tend to disable most systemd unit files as I don't really need anything systemd offers. Sadly distributions such as slackware kind of died - they are not dead, but too slow in updates, no stable releases in years, this is the hallmark of deadness.)
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