6 ms·

Void Linux: Some Context for Recent Events

43 points by BlackLotus89 7y ago

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
Well... That's truly unfortunate, but on a pragmatic level it really shouldn't be an issue; Void, by necessity, is no longer dependent on any one person after the last time he left. I'd only worry if it implied deeper organizational issues, which is possible but I don't see any obvious evidence.
emkemp 7y ago
It appears Juan RP is having some problems. https://twitter.com/xtraemeat https://twitter.com/xtraemeat
- storrgie 7y ago
  a bit of a tragic read there.
- ajarmst 7y ago
  Yeah. That strikes me as more of a "hey, are you OK? Do you have someone you can talk to?" situation than an interesting flamewar.
- squarefoot 7y ago
  Apparently his gf brought their daughters away from him, and he had to spend some time fighting in court. This struck on me because I have a friend in the same situation, and he is desperate to the point we fear for him to go suicidal. Using kids as a weapon against the ex partner is just evil. Now, unless Juan is violent to them, forcing the daughters not to contact or see him, especially if they suddenly become hostile to him, it would be a case of parental alienation, which he should fight against in court since it also hurts the kids.
  - jarfil 7y ago
    Also the #StayAtHome seems to bring out the best and the word in people, and he mentions having covid-like symptoms right before all of this. That amount of stress can be bad.
  - Igelau 7y ago
    This whole thing may have ignited when one of the maintainers put an entry in the fortunes file that made fun of that: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/c3b796acace52e275ff069347c21000f48138f28 https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/c3b796aca... Smells to me like they deliberately set him off so they'd have an excuse to stage a coup. Could be wrong, but this distro looks like it's maintained by a den of vipers and I'm sure as hell not going near it.
    - RunningDroid 7y ago
      >stage a coup From tfa: >This is not the first time xtraeme has left Void. I wrote about this on my personal site back in 2018, and you can read that full article over there.
      - Igelau 7y ago
        But then... > Did xtraeme resign or was he banned? > Timing is everything. The ticket which expressed xtraeme’s desire to resign was opened first, then over the next hour he lashed out at several project members. The resignation was processed per his wishes, and per his conduct torwards others a ban was applied at the organization level. That's not a "yes, he resigned." That's dodgy political talk.
        catach 7y ago
        I don't know how else you'd answer the question when it's "both".
    - resfirestar 7y ago
      No, that particular commit was in the aftermath. xtraeme's angry tweets started at 7:40 PDT, access to infrastructure was cut off at 8:40, and that commit was at 9:32. The individual who made the commit apologized on reddit and said it wasn't intended as a reference to xtraeme's personal situation. Terrible form though and certainly didn't help matters, but I think the outcome was determined by that point.
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
The beauty of open source is that if you find a project's maintainers lacking in some way, you can always fork the project. When the fork becomes more popular, it can lead to changes in the original.
- LEARAX 7y ago
  Well, here the (original) maintainer is the one doing the forking, so there's a bit of a twist.
resfirestar 7y ago
I use Void as my main desktop OS and I wasn't aware that xtraeme was back or that he was causing problems. My gratitude to the developers working to keep the distribution stable even in difficult times.
dTal 7y ago
It's a shame that Void only seems to get attention when there's some sort of social drama angle. So let me plug my daily driver of the past several years: Void is an excellent, excellent distro. It's quite similar to Arch in many ways, but its binary software repositories are much larger, and include some quite tricky customers (like FreeCAD). Its package management system is very advanced. Unlike Arch, shared libraries are tracked, so partial updates are supported. The "templates" (a BSD-ports-like system, like Arch's PKGBUILDs) are all kept in a single github repository, which means you can basically fork the entire distro, make as many changes to as many packages as you need to get a complex feature working, and - if you like - submit the entire lot back as a pull request. Distro-on-git - a powerful concept. Package building is stateless - a clean system is created in a chroot and build dependencies are automatically installed there. It's not nix, but it's highly practical. One gets the sense that the whole system was designed with a slightly wistful eye on the BSDs. systemd is eschewed in favor of the lightweight runit. ZFS support is first class. The repositories, in addition to all the standard Linux stuff, contain lots of little BSD hints - yes, you can install pulseaudio, but you can also install sndiod. You can install sudo, but also doas. Heck, you can even run the entire system off musl, instead of glibc. The system feels like a small voice of rebellion against the tide of bloat in Linux-land. "It doesn't have to be this way, you know...", it seems to want to say. And yet, if you want all that bloaty Linuxy stuff, it's there and it works brilliantly. I run Plasma 5 on my laptop and it's computing nirvana. I won't say it's rock-solid - rolling distros never are - but the simplicity and elegance of the system clearly yields stability dividends. And the core developers are, quite honestly, shit-hot - and friendly too, if you stop by the #voidlinux IRC channel on Freenode. What's not to love?
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > Unlike Arch, shared libraries are tracked, so partial updates are supported. Even in the bad case, xbps just tells you that there are conflicts and it can't do what you want. Which is annoying when it happens as a result of official repos rebuilding, but still nice (EDIT: or rather, better than breaking your system!).
- jack1243star 7y ago
  Since you also mentioned, how does it compare to NixOS? IIRC it is also a distro-on-git(hub), with stronger guarantees on separating package dependencies?
throwaway_ptr 7y ago
> Second, I never left void voluntarily. My relationship had a breakup and I had to be in the court for some time, fighting for my daughters... and it ended up with me being alone. [1] > ahesford: Anybody feel like a child whose parents are getting a divorce? [2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/g2l9ws/thoughts_on_juans_xtraeme_recent_rants/fns92jp https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/g2l9ws/thoughts_... [2] https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/bbb8bc557d8661665c7f7becc5edb0cb3a440ce3 https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/bbb8bc557... Someone please should give Juan RP a hug or something. > Now, unless Juan is violent to them, forcing the daughters not to contact or see him, especially if they suddenly become hostile to him, it would be a case of parental alienation, which he should fight against in court since it also hurts the kids.

43 points by BlackLotus89 7y ago

Well... That's truly unfortunate, but on a pragmatic level it really shouldn't be an issue; Void, by necessity, is no longer dependent on any one person after the last time he left. I'd only worry if it implied deeper organizational issues, which is possible but I don't see any obvious evidence.

emkemp 7y ago

It appears Juan RP is having some problems. https://twitter.com/xtraemeat https://twitter.com/xtraemeat

storrgie 7y ago
a bit of a tragic read there.
ajarmst 7y ago
Yeah. That strikes me as more of a "hey, are you OK? Do you have someone you can talk to?" situation than an interesting flamewar.
squarefoot 7y ago
Apparently his gf brought their daughters away from him, and he had to spend some time fighting in court. This struck on me because I have a friend in the same situation, and he is desperate to the point we fear for him to go suicidal. Using kids as a weapon against the ex partner is just evil. Now, unless Juan is violent to them, forcing the daughters not to contact or see him, especially if they suddenly become hostile to him, it would be a case of parental alienation, which he should fight against in court since it also hurts the kids.
- jarfil 7y ago
  Also the #StayAtHome seems to bring out the best and the word in people, and he mentions having covid-like symptoms right before all of this. That amount of stress can be bad.
- Igelau 7y ago
  This whole thing may have ignited when one of the maintainers put an entry in the fortunes file that made fun of that: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/c3b796acace52e275ff069347c21000f48138f28 https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/c3b796aca... Smells to me like they deliberately set him off so they'd have an excuse to stage a coup. Could be wrong, but this distro looks like it's maintained by a den of vipers and I'm sure as hell not going near it.
  - RunningDroid 7y ago
    >stage a coup From tfa: >This is not the first time xtraeme has left Void. I wrote about this on my personal site back in 2018, and you can read that full article over there.
    - Igelau 7y ago
      But then... > Did xtraeme resign or was he banned? > Timing is everything. The ticket which expressed xtraeme’s desire to resign was opened first, then over the next hour he lashed out at several project members. The resignation was processed per his wishes, and per his conduct torwards others a ban was applied at the organization level. That's not a "yes, he resigned." That's dodgy political talk.
      - catach 7y ago
        I don't know how else you'd answer the question when it's "both".
  - resfirestar 7y ago
    No, that particular commit was in the aftermath. xtraeme's angry tweets started at 7:40 PDT, access to infrastructure was cut off at 8:40, and that commit was at 9:32. The individual who made the commit apologized on reddit and said it wasn't intended as a reference to xtraeme's personal situation. Terrible form though and certainly didn't help matters, but I think the outcome was determined by that point.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

The beauty of open source is that if you find a project's maintainers lacking in some way, you can always fork the project. When the fork becomes more popular, it can lead to changes in the original.

LEARAX 7y ago
Well, here the (original) maintainer is the one doing the forking, so there's a bit of a twist.

resfirestar 7y ago

I use Void as my main desktop OS and I wasn't aware that xtraeme was back or that he was causing problems. My gratitude to the developers working to keep the distribution stable even in difficult times.

dTal 7y ago

It's a shame that Void only seems to get attention when there's some sort of social drama angle. So let me plug my daily driver of the past several years: Void is an excellent, excellent distro. It's quite similar to Arch in many ways, but its binary software repositories are much larger, and include some quite tricky customers (like FreeCAD). Its package management system is very advanced. Unlike Arch, shared libraries are tracked, so partial updates are supported. The "templates" (a BSD-ports-like system, like Arch's PKGBUILDs) are all kept in a single github repository, which means you can basically fork the entire distro, make as many changes to as many packages as you need to get a complex feature working, and - if you like - submit the entire lot back as a pull request. Distro-on-git - a powerful concept. Package building is stateless - a clean system is created in a chroot and build dependencies are automatically installed there. It's not nix, but it's highly practical. One gets the sense that the whole system was designed with a slightly wistful eye on the BSDs. systemd is eschewed in favor of the lightweight runit. ZFS support is first class. The repositories, in addition to all the standard Linux stuff, contain lots of little BSD hints - yes, you can install pulseaudio, but you can also install sndiod. You can install sudo, but also doas. Heck, you can even run the entire system off musl, instead of glibc. The system feels like a small voice of rebellion against the tide of bloat in Linux-land. "It doesn't have to be this way, you know...", it seems to want to say. And yet, if you want all that bloaty Linuxy stuff, it's there and it works brilliantly. I run Plasma 5 on my laptop and it's computing nirvana. I won't say it's rock-solid - rolling distros never are - but the simplicity and elegance of the system clearly yields stability dividends. And the core developers are, quite honestly, shit-hot - and friendly too, if you stop by the #voidlinux IRC channel on Freenode. What's not to love?

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> Unlike Arch, shared libraries are tracked, so partial updates are supported. Even in the bad case, xbps just tells you that there are conflicts and it can't do what you want. Which is annoying when it happens as a result of official repos rebuilding, but still nice (EDIT: or rather, better than breaking your system!).
jack1243star 7y ago
Since you also mentioned, how does it compare to NixOS? IIRC it is also a distro-on-git(hub), with stronger guarantees on separating package dependencies?

throwaway_ptr 7y ago

> Second, I never left void voluntarily. My relationship had a breakup and I had to be in the court for some time, fighting for my daughters... and it ended up with me being alone. [1] > ahesford: Anybody feel like a child whose parents are getting a divorce? [2] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/g2l9ws/thoughts_on_juans_xtraeme_recent_rants/fns92jp https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/g2l9ws/thoughts_... [2] https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/bbb8bc557d8661665c7f7becc5edb0cb3a440ce3 https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/bbb8bc557... Someone please should give Juan RP a hug or something. > Now, unless Juan is violent to them, forcing the daughters not to contact or see him, especially if they suddenly become hostile to him, it would be a case of parental alienation, which he should fight against in court since it also hurts the kids.