4 ms·

> you know for a fact that small lightweight software is not what you are building Maybe this is the point to stop and ask yourself, if you're doing it right?

> you know for a fact that small lightweight software is not what you are building Maybe this is the point to stop and ask yourself, if you're doing it right? There is no industry standard for complexity. It's the "dd" vs "balena etcher" argument. There is very small benefit to the average end user from literally 2000x increase in size/complexity, and for experienced user, fancier tool is actually worse (can't do "ssh foo cat blah | gunzip | dd")

eternityforest 4y ago
dd vs Etcher is actually my canonical examples for why I'm totally fine with complex software. dd doesn't verify after flashing. It doesn't alert when you're finished. It doesn't predict the time remaining. It On Reddit, I see about one "I wiped my disk with dd" post every month or two(Although I suppose using by-path might have prevented some of them, it's slightly more obvious). Even more relevant is the raspberry pi imaging utility that also lets you set some configuration options when flashing. It doesn't do anything you couldn't do with a shell script, and Etcher certainly doesn't actually need to be that big.... but it already exists, and using etcher instead of a custom script is one less custom thing to maintain. I can tell anyone on any platform "Oh yeah just use Etcher" and have a near guarantee they will know exactly what to do and not break anything. 40-80MB seems like a lot. I'm pretty sure you could build a clone in PyQt in a weekend. Etcher is also missing some features(I'd really expect it to be a full studio with plugins to configure the images, make backups, and test in QEMU, considering how big it is). But Etcher exists already. Using it is one less thing to worry about, one less custom script to possibly maintain, and one less possible mistake that could wipe a disk.

4 ms·

> you know for a fact that small lightweight software is not what you are building Maybe this is the point to stop and ask yourself, if you're doing it right?

by nousermane 4y ago

eternityforest 4y ago
dd vs Etcher is actually my canonical examples for why I'm totally fine with complex software. dd doesn't verify after flashing. It doesn't alert when you're finished. It doesn't predict the time remaining. It On Reddit, I see about one "I wiped my disk with dd" post every month or two(Although I suppose using by-path might have prevented some of them, it's slightly more obvious). Even more relevant is the raspberry pi imaging utility that also lets you set some configuration options when flashing. It doesn't do anything you couldn't do with a shell script, and Etcher certainly doesn't actually need to be that big.... but it already exists, and using etcher instead of a custom script is one less custom thing to maintain. I can tell anyone on any platform "Oh yeah just use Etcher" and have a near guarantee they will know exactly what to do and not break anything. 40-80MB seems like a lot. I'm pretty sure you could build a clone in PyQt in a weekend. Etcher is also missing some features(I'd really expect it to be a full studio with plugins to configure the images, make backups, and test in QEMU, considering how big it is). But Etcher exists already. Using it is one less thing to worry about, one less custom script to possibly maintain, and one less possible mistake that could wipe a disk.