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OS work used to feel so ceremonial, back in the old days (ie 2003.) Hobbyists could cobble together hardware and ship it to a data center, but if you couldn’t

OS work used to feel so ceremonial, back in the old days (ie 2003.) Hobbyists could cobble together hardware and ship it to a data center, but if you couldn’t afford a serial console you’d have to unrack the machine every time you messed up a kernel upgrade. Now I can just remotely blast a clean install on bare metal, and then build containers or VMs on that, and it’s so easy I can rebuild all infra every morning, from scratch, just for fun (ahem, to verify it’s idempotency.) Gone is the need for the high quality package management of Debian: The Universal Operating System. I lament this as much as I lament the decline in quality and commoditization of many many other things in life. Food, ISPs, journalism, education.

core-questions 6y ago
> Gone is the need for the high quality package management of Debian: The Universal Operating System. Well, almost. What's inside your container, though? For anything of moderate complexity, my containers always end up having some apt-get or yum installation in them; it's not like I want to Dockerfile up the manual from-source install steps for every small package, nor do I expect to have perfect upstream Dockerfiles to FROM that include all the exact bits I need....
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  Yes, but they are usually single task hosts. All the effort that maintainers put into keeping /etc tidy when multiple pieces of software are installed on the same host are for nought.
  - toyg 6y ago
    So you install exactly one package in each container...? I find it hard to believe. You wouldn’t be able to boot with a single package. Feels very much like saying “all the stuff I don’t (think I) need, is useless”.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  Not to mention having stuff built for you for all sorts of different architectures. It generally doesn't matter if you're running x86, ARM, whatever if you're installing packages from Debian; by and large everything in the distro is packaged for every architecture and they generally just work.
Spooky23 6y ago
Young whippersnappers. The old days were when you had to order a CD of Slackware in the 90s and hope your disk controller was supported. All great tooling becomes a victim of its success. Packaging is so good now and simple that you don’t have sysadmins anymore, and many companies know little or nothing about what they are doing. So people build the golden build and clone away.
- yencabulator 6y ago
  You had a Slackware CD? The old days were when you had a stack of only 20 floppies to install SLS with (of the required ~44 or something), had to download the disk contents at school and carry them home, and some of your floppies ended up having read errors. It took literally days of going back and forth, with your home PC sitting in the installer waiting for the next floppy.
- asveikau 6y ago
  Reading this I am reminded of when I first tried debian in the 90s and its packaging blew everything else away. Nobody had anything like apt-get. The top complaint, as it was for decades, was that packages were out of date. But I don't think there was as much cultural attitude that running a package from a few months or a year ago was as much a cardinal sin as it is today. People here suggest switching away from projects if there hasn't been a commit in two months. Back then, it wasn't so painful to deal unless you ran into the need for a very specific feature or bugfix. Then there was testing and unstable.
  - Doxin 6y ago
    And for readers unfamiliar with Debian: Debian testing is what other distros would call stable. Debian stable is what you'd pick to run, for example, a nuclear powerplant or the like. Debian testing is probably what you want to run on your desktop system.
- npsimons 6y ago
  > All great tooling becomes a victim of its success. Packaging is so good now and simple that you don’t have sysadmins anymore Too true. A lot of my interaction with sys admins at work is "hey can you install this package from the repo?" and only because I don't have administrator privileges. Not to downplay our sys admins, but it feels like they are overqualified sometimes.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I swear 20 years ago was so much better than everything today. Life was simpler, more people knew their places, it was hard to install an OS and good quality hardware was much harder to get hold of. Few whipper snappers mussing up the place--metooing and muhrightsing, it's hard to express to these poor souls in 2020 how much better we were as a superior generation both computer-wise and societally.

core-questions 6y ago

> Gone is the need for the high quality package management of Debian: The Universal Operating System. Well, almost. What's inside your container, though? For anything of moderate complexity, my containers always end up having some apt-get or yum installation in them; it's not like I want to Dockerfile up the manual from-source install steps for every small package, nor do I expect to have perfect upstream Dockerfiles to FROM that include all the exact bits I need....

gorgoiler 6y ago
Yes, but they are usually single task hosts. All the effort that maintainers put into keeping /etc tidy when multiple pieces of software are installed on the same host are for nought.
- toyg 6y ago
  So you install exactly one package in each container...? I find it hard to believe. You wouldn’t be able to boot with a single package. Feels very much like saying “all the stuff I don’t (think I) need, is useless”.
ryukafalz 6y ago
Not to mention having stuff built for you for all sorts of different architectures. It generally doesn't matter if you're running x86, ARM, whatever if you're installing packages from Debian; by and large everything in the distro is packaged for every architecture and they generally just work.

Spooky23 6y ago

Young whippersnappers. The old days were when you had to order a CD of Slackware in the 90s and hope your disk controller was supported. All great tooling becomes a victim of its success. Packaging is so good now and simple that you don’t have sysadmins anymore, and many companies know little or nothing about what they are doing. So people build the golden build and clone away.

yencabulator 6y ago
You had a Slackware CD? The old days were when you had a stack of only 20 floppies to install SLS with (of the required ~44 or something), had to download the disk contents at school and carry them home, and some of your floppies ended up having read errors. It took literally days of going back and forth, with your home PC sitting in the installer waiting for the next floppy.
asveikau 6y ago
Reading this I am reminded of when I first tried debian in the 90s and its packaging blew everything else away. Nobody had anything like apt-get. The top complaint, as it was for decades, was that packages were out of date. But I don't think there was as much cultural attitude that running a package from a few months or a year ago was as much a cardinal sin as it is today. People here suggest switching away from projects if there hasn't been a commit in two months. Back then, it wasn't so painful to deal unless you ran into the need for a very specific feature or bugfix. Then there was testing and unstable.
- Doxin 6y ago
  And for readers unfamiliar with Debian: Debian testing is what other distros would call stable. Debian stable is what you'd pick to run, for example, a nuclear powerplant or the like. Debian testing is probably what you want to run on your desktop system.
npsimons 6y ago
> All great tooling becomes a victim of its success. Packaging is so good now and simple that you don’t have sysadmins anymore Too true. A lot of my interaction with sys admins at work is "hey can you install this package from the repo?" and only because I don't have administrator privileges. Not to downplay our sys admins, but it feels like they are overqualified sometimes.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I swear 20 years ago was so much better than everything today. Life was simpler, more people knew their places, it was hard to install an OS and good quality hardware was much harder to get hold of. Few whipper snappers mussing up the place--metooing and muhrightsing, it's hard to express to these poor souls in 2020 how much better we were as a superior generation both computer-wise and societally.