3 ms·

Good system. No bullshit, and brave choices. Once you see how both OpenJDK and Mono need to be boostrapped under Guix, you'll understand a thing or two on the c

by anthk 2y ago

Good system. No bullshit, and brave choices. Once you see how both OpenJDK and Mono need to be boostrapped under Guix, you'll understand a thing or two on the computing madness (and chains) we are, deeply sunk. Also, I wish people improved Unicon as an alternative to Java/C# on small companies for RAD applications . With XFT support it would be one of the best alternatives here to the current bloat we are suffering everywhere.

duskwuff 2y ago
> Good system. No bullshit, and brave choices. Maybe if by "brave choices" you mean "finding creative new reasons to remove things", e.g. (in no particular order): - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/removal-of-php/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/removal-of-php/ (no PHP) - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-java-openjdk-support/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-java-openjdk-support/ (no Java) - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-d-bus-support/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-d-bus-support/ (no DBus) - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-sudo-and-oriented-towards-init-freedom/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-sudo-and-orie... (no sudo) - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-projects-with-freedom-flaws/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-projects-with... (no rust, no Chromium) Perhaps in a few years Hyperbola will reach its final, perfect state: a distribution which contains no packages at all, thereby providing users with a perfectly Free and perfectly secure system.
- anthk 2y ago
  I use it daily. For java, I've just set the JDK by hand, as I'm learning it for a future job, but I plan to ditch it after I have no use for it at home. No Sudo? Doas does it fine under OpenBSD. And so does Hyperbola. On Chromium... gven the future Google choices on extensions (hint: UBlock will either no work at all, or be severely limited) and current telemetry, that's a good riddance. You can just use Luakit, or Iceweasel-UXP up to a limit.
  - hobobaggins 2y ago
    Can you install chromium-derivatives like Brave?
- enriquto 2y ago
  > Perhaps in a few years Hyperbola will reach its final, perfect state There's still a long way to go. The elephant in the room, prudently sidestepped by the hyperbola community, is the removal of dynamic linking. Now that would be a great, but difficult, brave choice. Most of the other removals (except the removal of dbus, which is mind-boggingly awesome) are fairly isolated stuff. Fortunately, they are steadily taking steps in the right direction!
  - machinestops 2y ago
    See https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis for a proof of concept. No dynamic linking locks you out of Clang+LLVM (mostly: static clang isn't an officially supported configuration, but it can probably be forced to exist. I haven't properly looked into it yet.), Firefox, Chromium, QtWebEngine, (so no alt browsers, either), and probably a lot more. Statically linking every single package out there requires a lot of patches to build systems to get them to properly do it. Many build systems don't respect LDFLAGS and CFLAGS, or respect one or the other, or only partially respect them, causing a great deal of annoyance if you have a nonstandard desired result, such as fully static builds.
    - enriquto 2y ago
      > Many build systems don't respect LDFLAGS and CFLAGS, or respect one or the other, or only partially respect them, causing a great deal of annoyance Sounds good, doesn't it? This means that efforts to produce a fully static distribution would imply a sweeping wave of fixes across a wide range of packages and build systems!
      - chasil 2y ago
        But your ideal UNIX has already come and gone. "[Ultrix] never supported shared libraries or dynamically linked executables." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix
        2y ago
- hobobaggins 2y ago
  Honestly, most of those seem like strong marks in favor of Hyperbola! :) Now I'm wondering how easy it is to keep it automatically updated/maintained and how often config or packages break during upgrade.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  It's really weird that they target projects like PHP for their trademark policy, when the GPL itself contains no language allowing you to use an upstream project's trademark. In fact, the GPL explicitly grants you the ability to impose trademark restrictions on code you add to GPL code. For instance, Firefox is distributed under the similarly copyleft MPL, but Debian still had to distribute its version as Iceweasel until Mozilla gave its approval. (Also, seriously? Policing users' email providers in their mailing list [0]? Write all the blog posts you want, but banning addresses is just silly.) [0] https://www.hyperbola.info/news/hyperbola-rejects-all-email-domains-under-global-mass-surveillance-from-the-mailing-lists/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/hyperbola-rejects-all-email-...
- worik 2y ago
  Curious to see why "no Rust" I followed the link https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-projects-with-freedom-flaws/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-projects-with... "...problematic trademarks". Say what? There is a link: https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_trademark https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_t... Follow that... Permission Denied Sorry, you don't have enough rights to continue. Really? Yougottabekiddingme....
  - anthk 2y ago
    https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_issues https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_i...
  - sourcepluck 2y ago
    I thought Rust's trademark-related controversy was pretty well-known. Here: https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/rust_foundation_apologizes_trademark_policy/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/rust_foundation_apolo... Also, does this link from the wiki not work for you? https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_issues https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_i...
  - PotatoPancakes 2y ago
    Try this page, called "Rust's problems and concerns": https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_issues https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_i... In short, the Rust Foundation does not permit users to redistribute modified versions of Rust/Cargo without their explicit approval.
    - duskwuff 2y ago
      And, zooming out a bit: the reason Hyperbola wanted to modify Rust / Cargo was to prevent it from being used to compile non-free software ("[we wanted] to have Cargo removed as otherwise non-free packages could be used from projects being compiled"). This feels misguided. If you're in the position of adding limitations to software or stripping out features to keep the user from using it with nonfree software, you've lost track of why that software freedom mattered in the first place.
- nemoniac 2y ago
  Well that's a bit snarky but there is an element of truth to it. I'm reminded of the first line of the old spec for the Scheme programming language. "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary." https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r4rs_2.html#SEC2 https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r4rs_2.html#SEC2
masfoobar 2y ago
>...Once you see how both OpenJDK and Mono need to be boostrapped under Guix... Where is GUIX covered on this site? I am interested reading about it. I dont see how guix needs OpenJDK or Mono as it is written in GNU GUILE -- but maybe there is something I am not aware of.
- anthk 2y ago
  Guix in order to bootstrap OpenJDK and Mono from sources it needs to create a centipede-like toolchain building. WIth Rust it's even worse. One build per release since the first C++ compilable compiler.
  - masfoobar 2y ago
    Thank you. I misread your original comment but.. yeah.. very interesting to know.
HexDecOctBin 2y ago
Searching for Unicon brings up multiple results. Which one do you mean?
- anthk 2y ago
  The Unicon programming language, the new "Icon": http://www.unicon.org/ http://www.unicon.org/

by anthk 2y ago

duskwuff 2y ago

> Good system. No bullshit, and brave choices. Maybe if by "brave choices" you mean "finding creative new reasons to remove things", e.g. (in no particular order): - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/removal-of-php/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/removal-of-php/ (no PHP) - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-java-openjdk-support/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-java-openjdk-support/ (no Java) - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-d-bus-support/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/end-of-d-bus-support/ (no DBus) - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-sudo-and-oriented-towards-init-freedom/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-sudo-and-orie... (no sudo) - https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-projects-with-freedom-flaws/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-projects-with... (no rust, no Chromium) Perhaps in a few years Hyperbola will reach its final, perfect state: a distribution which contains no packages at all, thereby providing users with a perfectly Free and perfectly secure system.

anthk 2y ago
I use it daily. For java, I've just set the JDK by hand, as I'm learning it for a future job, but I plan to ditch it after I have no use for it at home. No Sudo? Doas does it fine under OpenBSD. And so does Hyperbola. On Chromium... gven the future Google choices on extensions (hint: UBlock will either no work at all, or be severely limited) and current telemetry, that's a good riddance. You can just use Luakit, or Iceweasel-UXP up to a limit.
- hobobaggins 2y ago
  Can you install chromium-derivatives like Brave?
enriquto 2y ago
> Perhaps in a few years Hyperbola will reach its final, perfect state There's still a long way to go. The elephant in the room, prudently sidestepped by the hyperbola community, is the removal of dynamic linking. Now that would be a great, but difficult, brave choice. Most of the other removals (except the removal of dbus, which is mind-boggingly awesome) are fairly isolated stuff. Fortunately, they are steadily taking steps in the right direction!
- machinestops 2y ago
  See https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis for a proof of concept. No dynamic linking locks you out of Clang+LLVM (mostly: static clang isn't an officially supported configuration, but it can probably be forced to exist. I haven't properly looked into it yet.), Firefox, Chromium, QtWebEngine, (so no alt browsers, either), and probably a lot more. Statically linking every single package out there requires a lot of patches to build systems to get them to properly do it. Many build systems don't respect LDFLAGS and CFLAGS, or respect one or the other, or only partially respect them, causing a great deal of annoyance if you have a nonstandard desired result, such as fully static builds.
  - enriquto 2y ago
    > Many build systems don't respect LDFLAGS and CFLAGS, or respect one or the other, or only partially respect them, causing a great deal of annoyance Sounds good, doesn't it? This means that efforts to produce a fully static distribution would imply a sweeping wave of fixes across a wide range of packages and build systems!
    - chasil 2y ago
      But your ideal UNIX has already come and gone. "[Ultrix] never supported shared libraries or dynamically linked executables." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrix
      - 2y ago
hobobaggins 2y ago
Honestly, most of those seem like strong marks in favor of Hyperbola! :) Now I'm wondering how easy it is to keep it automatically updated/maintained and how often config or packages break during upgrade.
LegionMammal978 2y ago
It's really weird that they target projects like PHP for their trademark policy, when the GPL itself contains no language allowing you to use an upstream project's trademark. In fact, the GPL explicitly grants you the ability to impose trademark restrictions on code you add to GPL code. For instance, Firefox is distributed under the similarly copyleft MPL, but Debian still had to distribute its version as Iceweasel until Mozilla gave its approval. (Also, seriously? Policing users' email providers in their mailing list [0]? Write all the blog posts you want, but banning addresses is just silly.) [0] https://www.hyperbola.info/news/hyperbola-rejects-all-email-domains-under-global-mass-surveillance-from-the-mailing-lists/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/hyperbola-rejects-all-email-...
worik 2y ago
Curious to see why "no Rust" I followed the link https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-projects-with-freedom-flaws/ https://www.hyperbola.info/news/no-support-for-projects-with... "...problematic trademarks". Say what? There is a link: https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_trademark https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_t... Follow that... Permission Denied Sorry, you don't have enough rights to continue. Really? Yougottabekiddingme....
- anthk 2y ago
  https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_issues https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_i...
- sourcepluck 2y ago
  I thought Rust's trademark-related controversy was pretty well-known. Here: https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/rust_foundation_apologizes_trademark_policy/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/17/rust_foundation_apolo... Also, does this link from the wiki not work for you? https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_issues https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_i...
- PotatoPancakes 2y ago
  Try this page, called "Rust's problems and concerns": https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_issues https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:rust_i... In short, the Rust Foundation does not permit users to redistribute modified versions of Rust/Cargo without their explicit approval.
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    And, zooming out a bit: the reason Hyperbola wanted to modify Rust / Cargo was to prevent it from being used to compile non-free software ("[we wanted] to have Cargo removed as otherwise non-free packages could be used from projects being compiled"). This feels misguided. If you're in the position of adding limitations to software or stripping out features to keep the user from using it with nonfree software, you've lost track of why that software freedom mattered in the first place.
nemoniac 2y ago
Well that's a bit snarky but there is an element of truth to it. I'm reminded of the first line of the old spec for the Scheme programming language. "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary." https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r4rs_2.html#SEC2 https://people.csail.mit.edu/jaffer/r4rs_2.html#SEC2

masfoobar 2y ago

>...Once you see how both OpenJDK and Mono need to be boostrapped under Guix... Where is GUIX covered on this site? I am interested reading about it. I dont see how guix needs OpenJDK or Mono as it is written in GNU GUILE -- but maybe there is something I am not aware of.

anthk 2y ago
Guix in order to bootstrap OpenJDK and Mono from sources it needs to create a centipede-like toolchain building. WIth Rust it's even worse. One build per release since the first C++ compilable compiler.
- masfoobar 2y ago
  Thank you. I misread your original comment but.. yeah.. very interesting to know.

HexDecOctBin 2y ago

Searching for Unicon brings up multiple results. Which one do you mean?

anthk 2y ago
The Unicon programming language, the new "Icon": http://www.unicon.org/ http://www.unicon.org/