@whitequark which one is the latter?

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT i agree about staggered deployment but that is neither specific to, nor requires distros. i think go is planning to do it ecosystem wide, for example

i also agree that a lot of software bakes developers' assumptions into it but i don't see anything packagers like as universal good. FHS was a mistake. non-reproducible builds are a mistake. non-hermetic builds are a mistake... some of these things distros get right, some very much not

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT if all distros do is ship vanilla software i'd much rather save the collective effort and invest in something like flatpak

flatpak is (sigh) kind of terrible, as i've been studying it in detail just yesterday night, but it's the direction i care about here more so than the exact implementation. it could be a nix flake for all i know. though nix is also kind of terrible (i use it a lot, i would know)

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@whitequark @SRAZKVT flatpak also has assumptions built in, flatpak (or rather, flathub) is a distro

you can't have one packaging format and expect it to work for everyone, gentoo supports 14 cpu architectures (amd64, arm, arm64, ppc, ppc64, x86, alpha, hppa, loong, mips, riscv, s390, spark, m68k)

flathub by what i can find has... amd64, x86, arm, arm64, and that's it?

not to mention how gentoo systems differ from nix which differ from guix, having a single packaging format with a single distribution channel would be hell for anything that doesn't conform to the notions of whomever built the tooling for that package format

nix is better but it's still not a one-size fits all, there's no such thing

[andrago@sk.not-a.cat]

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems @navi@social.vlhl.dev @SRAZKVT@tech.lgbt to add to this discussion, I am a huge flatpak advocate not because the tech is the best, but because it exists and has proven to work giving developers a consistent target for linux systems

you want to package it into your own distro? sure go ahead, but as the underlying dependencies are no longer the same support is up to the developer to decide AND there is a "canonical" build to test these on

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@whitequark @SRAZKVT

sure none of it may exclusive from distros, but the point is that distros (should, nay, must) look after their users -- the main point is being communitarian, not under exclusive control of the developer, e.g.

upstreams often don't do releases to fix big regressions, distros can patch those when needed
sometimes upstreams go haywire and the distro attempts to protect the users (newer keepassxc being masked on gentoo)

it's harder to do when the developer has complete control of the distribution method

[chaos@gts.schizofucked.monster]

@IngaLovinde @resistor @whitequark yeah we really value how rust's compiler is smarter than we are and points us to the exact issue rather than us having to break out a debugger
makes programming so much less energy intensive, rust's stdlib also maps very nicely to how our brain handles programming, it just requires a bit more upfront thinking of how to structure code/data, def worth the tradeoffs for us esp as we already have very little energy for programming

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT keepassxc is masked on gentoo because it's not on qt6 (source: i forked it and in discussion with the gentoo folks on replacing it). haven't heard anything about it being about protection

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@whitequark @SRAZKVT

and because it's riddled with dubious llms as well as being qt5, source, i talk with gentoo folks basically every day

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT but yeah ultimately i don't want unrelated third parties to insert themselves in the software distribution chain and then argue with me on the bugtracker about the correct (as per the infallible distro policy) way of doing things

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@andrago @navi @SRAZKVT yeah

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@whitequark @SRAZKVT but there's other examples too, like the shadow package i listed on op

sure the maintainer didn't actually go haywire, but it was caution for weird commits being released

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT i do not think that "the number of cpu architectures" is good as an optimization target either. why should i care about s390 users? that benefits ibm and almost nobody else in the end

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT i just don't see there much distro remaining if you mask all critical software exposed to llms. gentoo can't even replace bits of systemd last time i looked into the status of eudev, what hope is there for, like, linux

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT and trying to play maintainer ends up with debian style patchsets that more likely than not just add new the problems, but now in an opaque way

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@whitequark @SRAZKVT

that's exactly the point? there's people using s390, or mips, or riscv, but developers do not care

who does? distros that support those arches, try building software, fixes bugs on said software, send fixes upstream, like gentoo does *all the time*

"number of architectures" isn't an optimization target, there's no target, there's people wanting to use software on systems developers don't think of, know exist, or care about -- and there's distro packagers doing work for their communities to have that happen, sometimes they do it for themselves, most of the time they work on things that they won't ever use, so that their users can

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@whitequark @SRAZKVT

> eudev

here's a complete, albeit still experimental, complete reimplementation of systemd-udev: https://git.pinkro.se/Rose/gardenhouse/gardendevd.git/

made by, a gentoo user, it's capable of booting modern DEs like KDE

> if you mask all critical software

damage control and risk assessment is a thing

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT it is a thing that i'm also doing (which you'd know if you paid attention? never talked to you before) but a distro does not have the resources to do this unilaterally, and shouldn't mislead others into thinking it will be effective

[whitequark@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi @SRAZKVT gardendevd is interesting

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@whitequark rose also has a simple userdb and hostnamed (mostly for the sake of gnome), plus other tools like sysext, sysusers, ukify, and more, all reimplemented, all independent of each other and, obviously, of systemd

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@whitequark @SRAZKVT i know what you're doing, yes -- and we've talked before once but that's highly irrelevant

distros don't misled people, it's best efforts, and often enough it works