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Imagine writing Linux From Scratch and someone from Microsoft reads it and uses it to make a Linux distribution that goes on to power dozens of that trillion-do

by mastax 4y ago

Imagine writing Linux From Scratch and someone from Microsoft reads it and uses it to make a Linux distribution that goes on to power dozens of that trillion-dollar company's products. To be clear, I'm not saying that "you should be outraged," necessarily. It's just an interesting thing.

encryptluks2 4y ago
LFS wouldn't be the ideal disto to create a Linux distribution. It might be good to help train people how to make one but Yocto and other projects are better suited for creating a distro. The use of RPM though is IMO a bad choice and one that lets me know that it is very unlikely that this would ever become a major distro for Microsoft.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Of all the Linux package managers (sans 'frontends/wrappers'), RPM is probably the least horrible.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    I like Arch’s pacman the best.
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      Same here.. I think that is what mingw or some of the initial "Windows" Linux distros is based on. A PKGCONF file would really make creating and maintaining packages a breeze.
    - dTal 4y ago
      You should take a look at xbps, used by Void Linux. It's extremely similar in speed and interface, but tracks shared library dependencies and so supports partial updates. xbps-src, roughly equivalent to Arch's makepkg, statelessly builds packages in a chroot which, when writing "templates" (PKGBUILDs), helps make sure you haven't missed any build dependencies simply because they happen to be installed on your system.
  - nescioquid 4y ago
    To be honest, my first thought was "of course the people who insist on /r/n would pick RPM". Then I realized I haven't used RPM since RedHat 6, and maybe it's gotten better in the last twenty years... I've probably just gotten inured to apt, but do you say RPM is the least horrible because the interface is more logical/convenient, or just better at managing dependencies?
    - lmz 4y ago
      RPM is not an APT equivalent. It is a dpkg equivalent. The APT equivalent would be dnf/yum/apt-rpm.
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Sure, but why use a Linux package manager when you can use pkgsrc instead?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- gtirloni 4y ago
  > The use of RPM though is IMO a bad choice and one that lets me know that it is very unlikely that this would ever become a major distro for Microsoft. reply Interesting take. Care to elaborate?
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    RPM is antiquated. New package managers like apk & pacman have had great success due to their simplicity and attracting a lot of maintainers that are able to maintain more stable packages than other distros.
    - pxc 4y ago
      This is totally false, and compares package managers in incomparable categories (pacman's counterparts in the RPM-based package management world are Zypper and dnf, not rpm). Arch Linux itself has very few packages— ~10k, around half of what you find Fedora, an RPM-based distro. The DEB packaging format and tools related to it are way more convoluted, and still Debian has several times as many packages as Arch and many, many more maintainers than Arch does. The only area where the Arch community sees more contributors for packages is the AUR, where contributors are decidedly not maintainers, package quality is low, and packages are not stable. (And users face this in addition to the whole basic integration problem with source-based packages and packages installed via binary repos, of which only the latter is ever considered by pacman's dep solver during upgrades.) Users like pacman because it's fast. It's not nearly robust enough for use at serious scale. Cutting corners is how it gets that speed. Alpine's apk is just another lightweight cousin of dpkg that incorporates some higher-level dependency resolution in a barebones way, like ipkg and opkg, like are used on embedded systems or OpenWRT or whatever. It's not some maintainer magnet which has multiplied the (pretty tiny) Alpine repos (which don't even include, for example, a JVM).
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        False.. Arch Linux and Alpine maintains significantly more stable packages (meaning up-to-date) than other DEB and RPM-based distros. Zypper and dnf still use RPM BTW. Also, Alpine certainly does have a JVM so that statement is flat out false and now sure where you're getting your misinformation from.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
josephg 4y ago
Imagine being ok with trillion dollar companies using opensource code you wrote, for free. Imagine if the people who work at those companies aren't your enemy. But instead are potential customers and potential collaborators, who see value in your work and want it to succeed. Imagine if there was a good implementation of some idea, expressed as code. And we can all share and contribute to that single good implementation to avoid pointless work and avoid fragmentation. Imagine people from all across the world contributing both financially and via bug reports and pull requests to making that implementation succeed. This fear of being exploited by big companies seems to motivate a lot of people in the free software world, and personally I find it pretty odious. Why shouldn't big businesses use my code? The better opensource companies (Google, new Microsoft, Facebook, etc) contribute back to the community in all sorts of ways; and I consider that a net positive on the world. I've seen this fear show up for decades in all sorts of contexts, and I think I disagree with it every time. For example: - A few years ago I was involved in a big argument over the licence for OpenStreetMaps. There were essentially two camps: the "Oh no what if (big evil corp) uses our community mapping data to make their map better" camp, who wanted a restrictive anti-company license. And people like me who just wanted to give a gift of mapping data to the world. - This is the gap between GNU GPL (especially GPL3) and BSD/MIT licenses. As an opensource maintainer, I do have a problem with people who work at big companies expecting me to volunteer my time responding to issues on github. I'd like big companies who file issues to contribute financially in exchange for my attention. But if they don't pay, I'm more than happy for them to use my code. I made it for everyone. I'd really like it if fewer people needed to reinvent the wheel for silly licensing reasons.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  PRs to improve zstd's embarrassingly slow decoder require you to assign your firstborn to Zuck and new Microsoft is selling me a subscription to use my laundered open source code to generate autocomplete suggestions in their closed-source IDE that pegs 2 cores and needs 4 gigs of memory (on the remote machine only) to edit 50k text files over ssh
  - mappu 4y ago
    Zstd's decoder is very very fast for what it does, what ideas do you have to improve it? It's unlikely to beat lzo family on decompression speed, but that's a different class of compressor entirely. And probably there are still some more tricks zstd can learn from closed-source Oodle leviathan, but i don't think much more can be learned.

by mastax 4y ago

encryptluks2 4y ago

LFS wouldn't be the ideal disto to create a Linux distribution. It might be good to help train people how to make one but Yocto and other projects are better suited for creating a distro. The use of RPM though is IMO a bad choice and one that lets me know that it is very unlikely that this would ever become a major distro for Microsoft.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago
Of all the Linux package managers (sans 'frontends/wrappers'), RPM is probably the least horrible.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  I like Arch’s pacman the best.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    Same here.. I think that is what mingw or some of the initial "Windows" Linux distros is based on. A PKGCONF file would really make creating and maintaining packages a breeze.
  - dTal 4y ago
    You should take a look at xbps, used by Void Linux. It's extremely similar in speed and interface, but tracks shared library dependencies and so supports partial updates. xbps-src, roughly equivalent to Arch's makepkg, statelessly builds packages in a chroot which, when writing "templates" (PKGBUILDs), helps make sure you haven't missed any build dependencies simply because they happen to be installed on your system.
- nescioquid 4y ago
  To be honest, my first thought was "of course the people who insist on /r/n would pick RPM". Then I realized I haven't used RPM since RedHat 6, and maybe it's gotten better in the last twenty years... I've probably just gotten inured to apt, but do you say RPM is the least horrible because the interface is more logical/convenient, or just better at managing dependencies?
  - lmz 4y ago
    RPM is not an APT equivalent. It is a dpkg equivalent. The APT equivalent would be dnf/yum/apt-rpm.
- Maursault 4y ago
  Sure, but why use a Linux package manager when you can use pkgsrc instead?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
gtirloni 4y ago
> The use of RPM though is IMO a bad choice and one that lets me know that it is very unlikely that this would ever become a major distro for Microsoft. reply Interesting take. Care to elaborate?
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  RPM is antiquated. New package managers like apk & pacman have had great success due to their simplicity and attracting a lot of maintainers that are able to maintain more stable packages than other distros.
  - pxc 4y ago
    This is totally false, and compares package managers in incomparable categories (pacman's counterparts in the RPM-based package management world are Zypper and dnf, not rpm). Arch Linux itself has very few packages— ~10k, around half of what you find Fedora, an RPM-based distro. The DEB packaging format and tools related to it are way more convoluted, and still Debian has several times as many packages as Arch and many, many more maintainers than Arch does. The only area where the Arch community sees more contributors for packages is the AUR, where contributors are decidedly not maintainers, package quality is low, and packages are not stable. (And users face this in addition to the whole basic integration problem with source-based packages and packages installed via binary repos, of which only the latter is ever considered by pacman's dep solver during upgrades.) Users like pacman because it's fast. It's not nearly robust enough for use at serious scale. Cutting corners is how it gets that speed. Alpine's apk is just another lightweight cousin of dpkg that incorporates some higher-level dependency resolution in a barebones way, like ipkg and opkg, like are used on embedded systems or OpenWRT or whatever. It's not some maintainer magnet which has multiplied the (pretty tiny) Alpine repos (which don't even include, for example, a JVM).
    - encryptluks2 4y ago
      False.. Arch Linux and Alpine maintains significantly more stable packages (meaning up-to-date) than other DEB and RPM-based distros. Zypper and dnf still use RPM BTW. Also, Alpine certainly does have a JVM so that statement is flat out false and now sure where you're getting your misinformation from.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

josephg 4y ago

Imagine being ok with trillion dollar companies using opensource code you wrote, for free. Imagine if the people who work at those companies aren't your enemy. But instead are potential customers and potential collaborators, who see value in your work and want it to succeed. Imagine if there was a good implementation of some idea, expressed as code. And we can all share and contribute to that single good implementation to avoid pointless work and avoid fragmentation. Imagine people from all across the world contributing both financially and via bug reports and pull requests to making that implementation succeed. This fear of being exploited by big companies seems to motivate a lot of people in the free software world, and personally I find it pretty odious. Why shouldn't big businesses use my code? The better opensource companies (Google, new Microsoft, Facebook, etc) contribute back to the community in all sorts of ways; and I consider that a net positive on the world. I've seen this fear show up for decades in all sorts of contexts, and I think I disagree with it every time. For example: - A few years ago I was involved in a big argument over the licence for OpenStreetMaps. There were essentially two camps: the "Oh no what if (big evil corp) uses our community mapping data to make their map better" camp, who wanted a restrictive anti-company license. And people like me who just wanted to give a gift of mapping data to the world. - This is the gap between GNU GPL (especially GPL3) and BSD/MIT licenses. As an opensource maintainer, I do have a problem with people who work at big companies expecting me to volunteer my time responding to issues on github. I'd like big companies who file issues to contribute financially in exchange for my attention. But if they don't pay, I'm more than happy for them to use my code. I made it for everyone. I'd really like it if fewer people needed to reinvent the wheel for silly licensing reasons.

anonymoushn 4y ago
PRs to improve zstd's embarrassingly slow decoder require you to assign your firstborn to Zuck and new Microsoft is selling me a subscription to use my laundered open source code to generate autocomplete suggestions in their closed-source IDE that pegs 2 cores and needs 4 gigs of memory (on the remote machine only) to edit 50k text files over ssh
- mappu 4y ago
  Zstd's decoder is very very fast for what it does, what ideas do you have to improve it? It's unlikely to beat lzo family on decompression speed, but that's a different class of compressor entirely. And probably there are still some more tricks zstd can learn from closed-source Oodle leviathan, but i don't think much more can be learned.