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Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Symbolic Butt posted:

I've been using ubuntu and debian exclusively for idk how long. in my home mostly ubuntu with awesomewm because I didn't care really. like infernal machines said, I never dist-upgrade lol

I think the last time I saw ubuntu break REALLY HARD was in 2007 because of some xorg update shenanigan

so anyway I finally decided to try new stuff because I wanna be a hip linix person

ubuntu is broken the moment you enable universe/multiverse. the non-canonical repos are a shitshow of unpatched and/or hilariously broken "community" packages that replace debian packages at random. of course, all the software people actually want to use is in those known-bad repos

result: as a ubuntu user, your system is riddled with security holes and breakage from day one.

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Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
"long term support" is a laughable idea in a distribution where 95% of the packages are permanently unsupported and six months old on release day

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
oh yeah, the best part, i almost forgot: universe/multiverse are enabled by default

ubuntu is broken and unsupportable out of the box

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER

Suspicious Dish posted:

Wait, what? You tell your customers running old LTSes that you aren't going to backport patches to it and to upgrade to the newest LTS as soon as it's available?
Canonical will backport all manner of things to previous LTSes to keep them running as they were. I'm a community developer I don't have customers for my Wine packages nor do I work for Canonical, so I backport as I feel like it. And generally I feel like supporting every release back to the most recent LTS.

This isn't necessarily out of laziness either -- a lot of what users might consider "normal fixes" require new upstream versions of dependent libraries. Which, in turn, requires upgrading to a newer stable LTS release.

quote:

How is that in any way an LTS? I backport patches to RHEL5 every week. It loving sucks, but I do it because that's the contract the customer signed.
I've supported 12.04 LTS with new Wine beta releases. After 14.04 comes out I plan on only updating it with new stable wine releases and the users who want to track the betas will need to use the newer LTS. I'm sure if I had an actual customer asking otherwise I might change my mind.

I think the thing to understand here is that "most" of Ubuntu is community developers and the universe archive (and stuff inherited from Debian), it's not the Canonical employees supporting Main. So when I talk in generalities I'm not talking about the stuff you pay for.

Valeyard
Mar 30, 2012


Grimey Drawer
scientific linux 6 comes with installations of texlive from 2007 and it is a 5gb install to update, and it is a pain in the rear end

linux is a pain in the rear end

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER

Suspicious Dish posted:

The issue is that they're still running scripts as root that make untracked changes to your operating system. Yes, that could be updating a font or icon cache, but you're still left with files on your system with no way to rollback.

I also looked at a random postinst for a service:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/trusty/accountsservice/trusty/view/head:/debian/accountsservice.postinst

It first tries to racily kill and restart the service. Cool. Then it does a random migration with regexps on /etc/default/locale and /etc/environment. The files are not backed up and if the script fucks up, your computer is a brick.
This is an example of a package that still has a manually crafted maintainer script that isn't absorbed by debhelper. That's what .postinst files are -- a "random" one will only give you an example of exactly the kind of package I'm not talking about.

quote:

Well, you can repair it, but that means digging through poo poo in /etc/ that nobody should ever care about. Why the gently caress are config file migrations done with sed and awk in Ubuntu?
Most aren't.


I do agree in principle that package installs shouldn't make changes to files in "permanent" areas of the filesystem (this is in part why we have FHS) unless they can be equivalently removed upon package removal. That's one reason why configuration slowly moves from conf files to various .d folders where each package can dump something instead of appending to a file.

ShadowHawk fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Mar 22, 2014

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

ubuntu is broken the moment you enable universe/multiverse. the non-canonical repos are a shitshow of unpatched and/or hilariously broken "community" packages that replace debian packages at random. of course, all the software people actually want to use is in those known-bad repos

result: as a ubuntu user, your system is riddled with security holes and breakage from day one.
Are you one of those "any package changed from debian is bad" nits?

Just today I made one of those "random changes" to the debian winetricks package. The debian maintainer had decided to include a patch he authored that prevents the program from running unless you give it the --gui command line option. No, he didn't update the .desktop launcher to include that.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
Right, that's what I mean by "dropfiles". I actually wasn't pecking and hunting around various packages until I found one. I was writing patches for accountsservice the other day, so it was literally just the first package I thought to check.

You were talking about how most every package had stuff done through debhelper, but yet I only needed one for a counter-example. I didn't bother to check any others, so maybe I just hit a bad sample.

That said, what's the long-term plan here? Are they going to have a flag day where every package must be always using debhelper for everything?

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

ShadowHawk posted:

Are you one of those "any package changed from debian is bad" nits?

Just today I made one of those "random changes" to the debian winetricks package. The debian maintainer had decided to include a patch he authored that prevents the program from running unless you give it the --gui command line option. No, he didn't update the .desktop launcher to include that.

My mantra is "any patch not upstream or backported from upstream is bad". The Debian guy was an idiot and reverting back to upstream through your patches is fine.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
And I know that debbugs is a gigantic pile of incredible fun, but you should probably file a bug about that in the Debian package if you haven't already.

I am a bit curious as to the validity of packaging winetricks though. It's a giant shell script that you can just wget, right?

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER

Suspicious Dish posted:

My mantra is "any patch not upstream or backported from upstream is bad". The Debian guy was an idiot and reverting back to upstream through your patches is fine.
I generally follow this, but Wine has a few exceptions. The first is distro-specific stuff upstream has explicitly said needs to be done distro-specifically: which font aliases we make by default (because each distro has different fonts by default these days).

The second exception is the pulseaudio patches I apply to Wine. This is a fairly significant change. Upstream does not believe in them and has been doing a sound rework for years and years and it still doesn't work as a native pulse backend, which is absolutely needed by some users I've met firsthand (and generally appreciated by all users, somewhat regular complaints about wine sound dropping have basically disappeared since I did this move).

But in winepulse's case, it's cause I've got a developer actively maintaining the patches who helps me maintain the Wine package (and I helped him get him a job at Canonical so I know he'll stick around)


Orphaned non-upstream patches should generally die though.

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER

Suspicious Dish posted:

And I know that debbugs is a gigantic pile of incredible fun, but you should probably file a bug about that in the Debian package if you haven't already.

I am a bit curious as to the validity of packaging winetricks though. It's a giant shell script that you can just wget, right?
Yes it is just a wget-able thing but knowing it's on users systems makes it a lot easier for them to run various fiddly bits of Wine still needed. AppDB can just say "run winetricks xyz and this program will work" and the user doesn't need to learn about wget or even open a terminal (winetricks has a primitive but functional gui now).

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
Ah, cool. The last time I fiddled around with winetricks was 2009 or so.

And yeah, if an upstream maintainer says "well do that downstream", sure, apply those patches. We also apply winepulse in Fedora as well. The sound API rewrite has been going on for centuries.

I'm more talking about stuff like this: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/dhcp.git/tree/

where we effectively have our own fork of dhcpcd and nobody actually cares enough to try to get the ISC to take those patches.

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

ShadowHawk posted:

The second exception is the pulseaudio patches I apply to Wine. This is a fairly significant change. Upstream does not believe in them and has been doing a sound rework for years and years and it still doesn't work as a native pulse backend, which is absolutely needed by some users I've met firsthand (and generally appreciated by all users, somewhat regular complaints about wine sound dropping have basically disappeared since I did this move).

yeah this is the kind of thing i'm talking about when i say the community repos are full of random bullshit

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

Ah, cool. The last time I fiddled around with winetricks was 2009 or so.

And yeah, if an upstream maintainer says "well do that downstream", sure, apply those patches. We also apply winepulse in Fedora as well. The sound API rewrite has been going on for centuries.

I'm more talking about stuff like this: http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/dhcp.git/tree/

where we effectively have our own fork of dhcpcd and nobody actually cares enough to try to get the ISC to take those patches.

context is important. when red hat does something funny to upstream, whatever red hat is doing is now the standard.

when some fuckwit with a launchpad.net account does something funny, it's just another way ubuntu is broken.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

context is important. when red hat does something funny to upstream, whatever red hat is doing is now the standard.

when some fuckwit with a launchpad.net account does something funny, it's just another way ubuntu is broken.

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/wine.git/tree/wine-pulse-1.7.11.patch

we apply the exact same patch that they do. it's broken for them, but also the standard?

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

Suspicious Dish posted:

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/wine.git/tree/wine-pulse-1.7.11.patch

we apply the exact same patch that they do. it's broken for them, but also the standard?

yep.

gee it's funny how being the only vendor who matters vs a bored hobbyist changes the context!

Symbolic Butt
Mar 22, 2009

(_!_)
Buglord

spankmeister posted:

That looks like a script i would make which means it's really bad.

yeah :smugmrgw:

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
if red hat does it, it doesn't matter if it's stupid, the whole world is gonna have to pick it up anyway

see also: systemd, gnome3

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
hm yes the only reason systemd was adopted was because of the Red Hat Cabal and not because it solves a bunch of problems we've had with traditional init systems yes

CUNT AND PASTE
Aug 15, 2004

~see my amazon wishlistu~
lol at people real mad about systemd

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
i unironically miss smf

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008







question: Have you heard of wine-pipelight and will the patches in there ever make it to upstream Wine?

Valeyard posted:

scientific linux 6 comes with installations of texlive from 2007 and it is a 5gb install to update, and it is a pain in the rear end

linux is a pain in the rear end

don't use scientific linux

Symbolic Butt
Mar 22, 2009

(_!_)
Buglord
current linix status: compared to centos and ubuntu gnome, I'm liking fedora better already

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
Let me know if you have any issues with it. It's nowhere near perfect, we know.

Sapozhnik
Jan 2, 2005

Nap Ghost
what's so bad about arch anyway? it seems like they more or less save you the trouble of compiling poo poo from scratch and otherwise get out of your way.

the advent of systemd erased a lot of "distribution" bullshit and homogenised a lot of trivial arbitrary poo poo to be the same across all linuxes, which is worth it even before you get into the whole reliable scriptable service management and queryable syslog thing.

spankmeister
Jun 15, 2008






Mr Dog posted:

what's so bad about arch anyway? it seems like they more or less save you the trouble of compiling poo poo from scratch and otherwise get out of your way.

the advent of systemd erased a lot of "distribution" bullshit and homogenised a lot of trivial arbitrary poo poo to be the same across all linuxes, which is worth it even before you get into the whole reliable scriptable service management and queryable syslog thing.

My main gripe with arch is huge system changes every so often that if you miss them youre gonna have problems updating. I ran it on an old laptop that i used once every two to three weeks and every single time i wanted to use it i had to cj my drat system because they decided /var is deprecated and it should live in /usr/var with a symlink back or whatever. You'd go pacman -Syu and it would throw a fit.

Also a related issue is untracked files in directories pacman wants to do something with. I think i did the syslinux switch one time and it all went to poo poo because i had a bunch of old kernels in /boot that, although installed by pacman, were no longer tracked by pacman for whatever reason so it threw up its arms and said gently caress it.

gently caress pacman seriously. Don't even get me started about the aur

DONT THREAD ON ME
Oct 1, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo
Floss Finder

spankmeister posted:

My main gripe with arch is huge system changes every so often that if you miss them youre gonna have problems updating. I ran it on an old laptop that i used once every two to three weeks and every single time i wanted to use it i had to cj my drat system because they decided /var is deprecated and it should live in /usr/var with a symlink back or whatever. You'd go pacman -Syu and it would throw a fit.


yep basically this, exactly. that was 100% of my issue with arch. and it's 'working as intended wontfix' because they idea is that you're supposed to cj your system and read documentation otherwise arch isnt right for you or whatever.

maybe it's better now but i'll never find out because i'm too lazy to install it now that they've gotten rid of the install gui

Breakfast All Day
Oct 21, 2004

Valeyard posted:

scientific linux 6 comes with installations of texlive from 2007 and it is a 5gb install to update, and it is a pain in the rear end

linux is a pain in the rear end

scientific linux is poo poo

last time i had to use it you couldnt even get modern versions of gsl or scipy without building everything from blas up manually

Broken Machine
Oct 22, 2010

I not an Arch zealot or anything, and actually it's the only linux I have, but I wanted to turn an older piece of hardware into a midi controller, and had some other custom config I needed and it's been great for that. Plus they threw in an easter egg that makes it so pacman has a little pacman chewing dots on the progress bar when you install stuff and that's just fun. That's my Arch story anyways thanks for reading

Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene
you could do worse than arch

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe
My issue with Arch is not only that it gets stale very quickly, but the community seems to be extremely hostile when you need to fix it.

I went into #archlinux once when my computer wouldn't boot after an update and all they did was convince me that Arch is for hipsters only, not for anybody who wants to get poo poo done. They told me to read the wiki and the manual and the news posts, but none of those things actually helped me fix my drat computer.

It actually turned out that it my issue wasn't documented anywhere on the wiki, or the manual, or the news posts. I forget what the actual issue was, but it was an edge case in pacman not upgrading something correctly. It was their bug, and I eventually filed a bug on their bug tracker and they fixed it.

But of course the community can't let somebody besmirch the good name of our Arch, our Pacman and the Holy AUR. It's 100% perfect, just read the wiki and manual and news posts you loving idiot.

Valeyard
Mar 30, 2012


Grimey Drawer

Breakfast All Day posted:

scientific linux is poo poo

last time i had to use it you couldnt even get modern versions of gsl or scipy without building everything from blas up manually

spankmeister posted:

don't use scientific linux

its what we use in our lab machines at the university so i use it in the house just to be consistent and so i dont need to spend 30 minutes trying to figure out how to do something in some other distro

everything about our computer setup is really bad

being forced to host our git repos on an internal server that can only be accessed on campus

jenkins is also hosted on that same server and has so many problems

DONT THREAD ON ME
Oct 1, 2002

by Nyc_Tattoo
Floss Finder

Suspicious Dish posted:

My issue with Arch is not only that it gets stale very quickly, but the community seems to be extremely hostile when you need to fix it.

I went into #archlinux once when my computer wouldn't boot after an update and all they did was convince me that Arch is for hipsters only, not for anybody who wants to get poo poo done. They told me to read the wiki and the manual and the news posts, but none of those things actually helped me fix my drat computer.

It actually turned out that it my issue wasn't documented anywhere on the wiki, or the manual, or the news posts. I forget what the actual issue was, but it was an edge case in pacman not upgrading something correctly. It was their bug, and I eventually filed a bug on their bug tracker and they fixed it.

But of course the community can't let somebody besmirch the good name of our Arch, our Pacman and the Holy AUR. It's 100% perfect, just read the wiki and manual and news posts you loving idiot.
working as intended, actually

ShadowHawk
Jun 25, 2000

CERTIFIED PRE OWNED TESLA OWNER

spankmeister posted:

question: Have you heard of wine-pipelight and will the patches in there ever make it to upstream Wine?
Yes the pipelight guys hang out in Wine IRC channel and do their best to upstream their patches.

CUNT AND PASTE
Aug 15, 2004

~see my amazon wishlistu~
arch really hasn't broken itself in a long time (check the front page, all the announcements there are all pretty minor)

the aur is the killer feature for me. dealing with custom repos and PPAs is really terrible. admittedly, the aur isn't perfect, but you have a greater chance of the package not completely disappearing because someone got bored or banned from launchpad

CUNT AND PASTE
Aug 15, 2004

~see my amazon wishlistu~
for anyone who thinks building from the aur is bad hasn't found pacaur.

Suspicious Dish
Sep 24, 2011

2020 is the year of linux on the desktop, bro
Fun Shoe

oval office AND PASTE posted:

for anyone who thinks building from the aur is bad hasn't found pacaur.

Is that one of those AUR wrappers that they tell you never to use because of security issues because packages have to build as root?

CUNT AND PASTE
Aug 15, 2004

~see my amazon wishlistu~
yes i'm sure the developers didn't think of that at all

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CUNT AND PASTE
Aug 15, 2004

~see my amazon wishlistu~
it compiles as the user and then installs through sudo, it even prompts and asks if you'd like to check the PKGBUILD script for maliciousness. basically, it's 100% like doing it manually.

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