On August 23, 2016 5:56:39 PM EDT, Sean Lynch <seanl@literati.org> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 3:38 AM John Newman <jnn@synfin.org> wrote:
On Aug 17, 2016, at 3:12 AM, Tom <tom@vondein.org> wrote:
On Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 01:30:17PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote: A major distro heading that way (e.g. Debian) might encourage
to increase the configurability of their own software perhaps?
Developers != distro|package maintainers, and free software should be portable and not distro specific. So, developers wouldn't have anything to do here, only maintainers.
Ahah! Yes so we need a new default packaging/ installation format to be supported by RPM and DPKG, to support the better way, e.g.:
So look into /var/lib/dpkg/info - that's heading for 9K files on my system - and this is a relatively fresh install (<12months)!
That's not human friendly.
Because humans are not the intended audience for this stuff. Use dpkg -l [| less or the like].
The point is just multiple versions parallel installs, that's all.
There are already solutions for this, e.g. look at PC-BSDs
developers packages.
Or use a container. Or compile yourself and
Docker might be a little big for every binary in the system ;). I tend to agree that the base system is ok without being a bunch of symlinks, but doing something like this for /usr/local does work great on OSX with homebrew (which is written in ruby btw)
+1 for Homebrew on Macs, but then you're using a Mac ;-)
I just got dual display functionality working properly on my hackintosh. For years I ran only Linux or FreeBSD at home but I'm afraid I was rather seduced by the combination of Unix and good UI / apps that Mac OSX brought...and when combined with the low price point of a hackintosh (and the big fuck you to capitalism), it's hard to resist... Of course I still use a Linux desktop at work, primary hosted server is freebsd, etc. ..
There's also Nix and its GNU NIH copy Guix, which can be installed in your homedir or /usr/local on most Unix-like systems. They both have the added advantage of having any number of separate "profiles" (i.e. symlink farms) for building packages, doing day-to-day stuff, etc. And since they modify the system monotonically, you can always roll back packages (but not any non-versioned state) semi-atomically, take snapshots (which you could do with ZFS anyway), etc.
Somehow I've never played with this particular piece of software... Will check out.
"Docker for everything" is not a totally off the wall idea. Not specifically docker but namespaces & cgroups for making software that's used to Unix-like discretionary access controls and make it act more like object-capability software. You'd need a UI or shell or something for expressing what capabilities to pass along, for example something that interprets annotated filenames, converts them to filenames in the process's own namespace, and handles mounting the files into the process's namespace. Of course, then you're probably just reinventing SELinux or something, though I do think there's potential there to make the user interface a little less obtuse than SELinux policies.
I don't need /bin/ls and /bin/cp and /bin/[insert simple base util here] wrapped in a container and never found SELinux worth the hassle, but I suppose some people might want that level of headache... ;). John -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.