• 2 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Yeha, but you can ask for help without taking a shit on the effort of thousands of engineers.

    I doubt OP thought, ‘I’m going to take a shit on thousands of engineers.’ It’s okay to not know what to do, including asking for help. If they don’t know what to do with “error 2,” they’re obviously lost. This unwelcoming attitude to newcomers is a big problem, and in my opinion, it’s probably best not to contribute to it.

    You can rephrase what you’re saying and provide better help to someone who’s completely lost in a much more polite and informative way. It’s better for everyone.





  • Synthead@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldCan I get a filesystem cleanup on aisle 6?
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    11 months ago

    systemd daemons are configured via /etc/systemd, and systemd itself lives in /usr/lib/systemd/systemd. How can systemd run or start the configured services without the root disk mounted? The initrd (from the boot partition) only contains enough of an environment to call the entrypoint for the init system, not contain the entirety of systemd (or the configured services).





  • You know what?? I figured that I miss all the shots I don’t take, and thought I’d give it a try. I built a makeshift tent from two tarps held by a steel tamper and a handtruck held down with buckets of water. I have an automated home, so I put one of the temperature/humidity sensors out there and hung in the lower area of the tent with a coat hanger. I set a ceramic space heater on a couple bricks, and fired it up.

    The results? It’s currently sitting at 65F with 43% humidity, which is less than inside our home. I think the thermostat is even oscillating, so I’m going to go out there and turn it up. I’ll have a graph of the temperature and humidity all throughout the night, but this is hotter and drier than a summer night! And it’s in the 30s outside!

    Here’s a screenshot of the data from me bringing the sensor outside, handling it, and letting it be in the tent:

    So yeah, this is going to work great. I’m letting the pavers warm up and dry out overnight, then sometime midday, I’m definitely doing the poly sand. I’ll make sure I get it cleaned up and ready to leave alone, then I’ll cover it just like I did. Seriously, this is going to work better than waiting for the spring.


  • Yeah, it does sound like a bad idea, and I’m thinking more and more that I should just sweep utility sand between the pavers instead and call it a day.

    Why not just wait until late spring?

    The only reason I’m trying to get ahead of this now (instead of waiting for warmer weather) is because I’m building a structure around the patio that will make it difficult to sweep or blow off the sand as it cures. It’ll probably get everywhere and get nasty.

    Although, it’ll be a covered area too, so perhaps the advantages of the poly sand are marginal. There won’t be any weed or moss issues, and it won’t be exposed to weather basically ever. So perhaps I just shouldn’t bother and sweep regular sand in. The benefits of poly sand probably isn’t worth the very real risk of making my patio really nasty.


  • Yeah… this is my inner voice, too. I’m kinda thinking that I should just sweep utility sand into the pavers and not worry too much about the polymeric stuff. Honestly, the only reason why I’m thinking of poly sand is because I’m kinda thinking that the pavers would stand up better to legs of outdoor furniture. Although, perhaps if I work enough utility sand into the pavers with lots of tamping and brushing, it shouldn’t be a big deal? I mean, it’s not like all patios done right without poly sand are failing.



  • Yeah, package maintainers should have their dependencies figured out. “Managing dependencies is too hard” is a distro packager’s problem to figure out, and isn’t a user problem. When they solve it and give you a package, you don’t need to figure it out anymore.

    Plus, frequent breaking changes in library APIs is a big no-no, so this is avoided whenever possible by responsible authors. Additionally, authors relying on libs with shitty practices is also a no-no. But again, you don’t need to worry about dependences because your packager figured this out, included the correct files with working links, and gave them to you as a solved problem.


  • A package typically includes the program and its data inside the package. It’s not just an install script. Imagine if Chrome’s MSI installer was simply a wrapper that also downloaded the browser. Imagine if there was a vulnerability with this, and it downloaded and installed something else. Since the package didn’t include the program files, it wouldn’t be able to tell if they were genuine. It only fetched the MSI, which was a download that initially passed the expected checksum (if it even does that).

    Additionally, file lists help ensure that programs and packages don’t conflict with one another. What if you wanted Chromium and Chrome at the same time. Can you do that? Simply wrapping an MSI doesn’t guarantee that. Perhaps there are conditionals in an installer that includes a vendored library under some circumstances, which would make them conflict.

    What about package removals? Some programs leave a bunch of junk behind in their uninstaller. Typically, since packages very often contain their own files, they simply delete their files when they’re being upgraded or removed. If a package manager puts full trust in an MSI to always be exactly correct, then it loses complete control over correctly managing file removals.

    I could go on and on, with more examples, but “run this binary installer” is the Wild West of putting software on your system. This is mostly the status quo on Windows, but this is a very poor standard. Other operating systems have solved this problem with proper packaging for decades.

    When building a package from sources, it makes sense to wrap installers, but then you produce a package that is typically distributed by a mirror. These packages would then by downloaded by you, and contain the source of truth that is trusted to be what it is and that it’ll do what it’s supposed to do without any doubts to consistency and security.






  • Synthead@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldMonster
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    1 year ago

    The bloat most people will care about in terms of Linux is facing down a software update prompt with 1000 packages and feeling anxiety over the last such dialog box destroying the use of their favorite apps.

    This would be a bug in packaging. File a bug with the distro.

    This doesn’t happen as often as you think on a properly-configured system.


  • Synthead@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldMonster
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    1 year ago

    Imagine a world where people say “I would use Linux, but I’m going to stay with Windows because Linux is too bloated.”

    I don’t know where the recent surge of not wanting package dependencies is coming from. Folks even not wanting dynamic links. We’re acting like Linux distros are somehow suddenly broken or impossible to maintain, yet there are hundreds of successful distros doing just that, and for decades.