61–70 of 85 posts
I've been using Gentoo since 2003, and I don't really plan on changing any time soon... > We don’t go out of our way to tell you how to use your system I'm not really sure I believe this, because the default profiles do exactly that. One day you'll be happy with your pam config, then bam, package updates and you're forced into passwdqc and faillock.
Exactly the same is true for me.
I think it's time to use an LLM to rewrite portage in C. Might be one of my next projects. Should not take long and the result will be easy to deterministically test side by side.
And get rid of the bashims in OpenRC to make it posix-sh compliand while we're at that.
Most bashisms are very old and they come from ksh. Bash has added very few features beyond what was already quasi-standard in UNIX shells.
POSIX has standardized a shell variant that had already been obsolete for a long time.
The scripts that use the additional facilities added by ksh and also a few added by zsh, which now are all available in bash, can be written in a way that makes them more concise, more clear and less prone to bugs.
I believe that bash must be considered the standard for shell scripts, not the POSIX shell, which has been obsolete for more than 3 decades, i.e. since long before the existence of the POSIX standard.
When using a POSIX shell, there are many unavoidable things that can be performed only by invoking external command line utilities, instead of using intrinsic shell features. This not only can make the script much slower, but it adds extra software package dependencies, instead of avoiding such dependencies, which is the declared purpose of using a POSIX shell.
Making your shell script dependent on the existence of bash is less risky than making it dependent on the existence of awk, which may be forced when using a POSIX shell. (The existence of awk is mandated by POSIX, but there are plenty of Linux systems that do not have installed all the POSIX utilities, but they have bash.)
It is true that bash is ubiquitous only on Linux, while on *BSD it is optional. I have used FreeBSD and other *BSD systems for as many decades as I have used Linux. My first action when installing a *BSD system, after the base system is installed, has always been to install bash. I believe that whoever does not do this is mistaken and they should not demand to receive scripts that can be run without having installed one of the bash, ksh or zsh shells.
I have not had the, ahem, privelege yet of installing Gentoo. I gave up on Linux a while back after I bricked my computer because I missed an update on Arch Linux (no joke). Got a macbook and I’ve been happy ever since…well, at least until I was trying to shareplay Mulholland Drive with my girlfriend while she’s out of town and discovered that the only way to manually adjust audio levels of facetime vs, say, the movi…
Good news! These days, you can just buy a computer with Linux preinstalled, with support!
Just leave the distro it shipped with alone and live your life.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> One day you'll be happy with your pam config, then bam, package updates and you're forced into passwdqc and faillock. Are you saying you've had your PAM config broken by a package update when you didn't update anything in /etc, or that you had your PAM config broken by a package update where you blindly accepted changes to stuff in /etc?
Both, really. Pam is a very annoying piece of software to deal with... if you configure it wrong, you'll either lock everyone out, or let everyone in regardless of what password they use. If you’re using a central LDAP server, and accidentally compile out LDAP support, you'll probably lose access to that machine pretty quickly. Any time I upgrade pam/shadow, I have a root window open and ready to save my butt after s…
There were some discussions in systemd[1] about a protocol that would in future possibly provide a replacement for it if you are interested. Discussions have stalled and I am unsure why, but the thoughts do exist.
I have not had the, ahem, privelege yet of installing Gentoo. I gave up on Linux a while back after I bricked my computer because I missed an update on Arch Linux (no joke). Got a macbook and I’ve been happy ever since…well, at least until I was trying to shareplay Mulholland Drive with my girlfriend while she’s out of town and discovered that the only way to manually adjust audio levels of facetime vs, say, the movi…
> I gave up on Linux a while back after I bricked my computer because I missed an update on Arch Linux (no joke) if you did not want a high maintenance distro why choose Arch? Its meant for the opposite of a Mac user - people who want to control everything, vs people who want it all taken care of for them. There are lots of things in the middle. > I don’t have time to futz around installing Linux distros instead of g…
I use FreeBSD and Arch primarily. FreeBSD gives me a lot of customisation options(ports ftw) while at the same time, it’s remarkably stable.
With Arch I find myself praying shit won’t break with every update, and a lot of 3rd party software just don’t work.
Hence why I keep returning to FreeBSD for my servers.
What kinda baby would come from mashing together gentoo, void, freebsd, and nix?
Gentoo's portage is already based (in theory) off of FreeBSD's ports system.
Of course, nowadays there is little resemblance between portage and the FreeBSD ports, after a few decades of separate evolution.
When I switched to Gentoo (in 2003), among the Linux distributions (after previously using many others, like Slackware, Redhat, Suse, Mandrake etc.), I had already used for many years (since around 1995) the FreeBSD ports, so this was what attracted me to Gentoo, its software package system and its documentation, both of which had a level of quality comparable with FreeBSD and much superior to what the other Linux distributions provided at that time.
I didn't realize how strict they were against LLMs. Codex has really helped my fix and tighten up my AUR PKGBUILDs. I was thinking about trying Gentoo in the future, but not being able to contribute because I use LLMs in my workflow sucks.
You can always run your own portage overlay. I do it for some random packages that aren't in the main tree.
If not we should make one. We should call it Sloppage so the Gentoo devs know what it's about. X-D
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can always run your own portage overlay. I do it for some random packages that aren't in the main tree.
Is there a third party like the AUR? If not we should make one. We should call it Sloppage so the Gentoo devs know what it's about. X-D
I think it's time to use an LLM to rewrite portage in C. Might be one of my next projects. Should not take long and the result will be easy to deterministically test side by side.
And get rid of the bashims in OpenRC to make it posix-sh compliand while we're at that.