Re: Perfect Jessie is something like this...
On Sun, Nov 2, 2014 at 11:57 AM, The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On 11/01/2014 at 10:20 PM, lee wrote:
>
>> Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> writes:
>>
>>> Miles Fidelman wrote:
>
>>>> Right. This sounds more and more like "we're going to rewrite
>>>> the rules, and if you don't like it, we're taking our ball and
>>>> going home."
>>>
>>> Various people have tried to explain how a binary distribution
>>> like Debian works (build packages with all options included by
>>> defauls) and how shared libraries work on Linux (all the libraries
>>> need to be there to satisfy symbol resolution at run time, even if
>>> none of the code is ever used). When those explanations fell on
>>> deaf ears, people have resorted to analogy. That was clearly a
>>> waste of time too.
>>
>> Appreciating and understanding an explanation doesn't mean that
>> someone who appreciates the explanation and understands it comes to
>> the same conclusions or opinions about what has been explained.
>>
>> Your car manufacturer and the sales people can give you all kinds of
>> explanations about why you'd be forced to never take off the trailer
>> and keep telling you that the rules demand it to remain hooked up all
>> the time. That doesn't mean that you like the idea or that you would
>> buy the car.
>
> One difference is that these are not invented or imposed "rules"; they
> are an essential and pretty-much inherently unavoidable part of the way
> dynamic-shared-library software *works*.
You know, when Lee started this thread, I was thinking somewhat the same thing.
But he really isn't so much talking about the way libraries work
(which I know a way to fix, if I had time to build my own distro using
my own replacement for elf) as he is talking about using a bad modular
restructuring to cause the libraries to get entangled with systemd
entangled libraries.
> Having an opinion that they're
> bad is no more meaningful or practical than having an opinion that
> gravity is bad. (Or, say, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Which I
> bring up as a counterexample to my own point, since I personally do
> reject that principle as part of my larger philosophy.)
Isn't Heisenberg just a clumsy description of the statistic nature of
the composition of quarks and leptons?
> If you want to avoid these rules entirely, I believe you'd have to
> either design a system from the ground up (quite possibly the level of
> defining what the format of a binary executable is, if not below) with
> the specific goal of not requiring them, or use exclusively static
> linking, which has considerable disadvantages compared to dynamic
> linking.
Static linking doesn't really solve the problem by itself, of course.
> Or you could write in an interpreted language instead of one that gets
> compiled to native executable code, but then you still have to have a
> native-code interpreter for that language, so that doesn't avoid the
> problem entirely.
Just shoves it off to the side a bit.
> Both of those approaches miss out on a lot of existing software, and so
> far, no one seems to have thought of either one of them as worth the
> trouble.
That is, those who have thought it worth the trouble keep running into
more trouble than they thought they would.
> If you want to give either one of them a try, I think it could
> make for an interesting project, but the odds of your coming up with a
> viable system in the end are nearly as long as the odds of my
> Heisenberg-rejecting philosophy ever producing any real-world
> consequences.
It's terrible that funding is as important as theoretical viability.
But the thing Lee is getting at is the arbitrary re-partitioning of
functionality by which udev becomes essential to programs that would
not usually need to know more than the standard file system interface,
etc.
Sure, systemd has been cut up into "modules". But the modules are not
independent, and they should be.
Some of the work being done in debian, to allow multiple inits, is
helping to partially correct that.
--
Joel Rees
Be careful when you look at conspiracy.
Look first in your own heart,
and ask yourself if you are not your own worst enemy.
Arm yourself with knowledge of yourself, as well.
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