Category: Gentoo

(update on 2016-01-28: please note that this post is outdated and no longer adequately expresses my attitude towards the two competing formats)

Some of you may already have noticed that sys-apps/ed and sys-fs/ddrescue packages started pulling in lzip archiver. «Is this some new fancy archiver?» you may ask. The answer is «no. It’s been around for a very long time, and it never got any real interest.»

You can read some of the background story in New Options in the World of File Compression Linux Gazette article. Long story short, lzip was created before xz as a response to the limitations of .lzma format used by lzma-utils. However, it never got any real attention and when xz-utils was released as a direct successor to lzma-utils it became practically redundant. And the two projects co-existed silently until lately…

Over the past five years, Antonio Diaz Diaz, lzip’s author, and a few project supporters were trying to convince the community that the lzip format is superior to xz. However, they were never able to provide any convincing arguments to the community, and while xz gained popularity lzip stayed in the shadow. And it was used mostly by the projects Diaz was member of.

It seems that he has finally decided that advocacy will not help his pet project in gaining popularity. Instead, he decided to take advantage of his administrator position in the mentioned GNU projects and discontinue providing non-.lz tarballs. As he says, «surely every user of ddrescue would like to know about lzip […]».

So, Gentoo user, would you like to know about lzip? Let’s try to get a few fair points here.

Continue reading “A few words on lzip compressor”

One of the major problems that I have faced in Gentoo is that whatever I was doing on a larger scale made some people really unhappy. I would even say that the specifics of Gentoo make it even possible for users to get outraged (and obviously, let all the world know how outraged they are) by a few files they don’t like having installed.

This brings the question whether we should struggle to keep all of our users happy, or whether keeping majority of our users satisfied is sufficient.

I don’t believe that it is actually possible to keep everyone happy. It’s a kind of never-ending struggle that consumes valuable time and demands sacrifices. You work on making one user happy, the other one doesn’t like the result. You work towards the second one, third one is unhappy. You satisfy all three of them, now fourth comes outraged with the net result.

Continue reading “Keeping the majority happy”

One of the more curious problems of running Linux on desktops is handling the local device access. The idea is usually quite simple: local users should have access to devices such as removable media (floppies, pendrives), scanners, speakers, webcams and ability to power off or reboot the computer. At the same time, remote users should have that access restricted.

Why? I think the main rationale behind this is that those users have physical access to those functions (yes, you could say that they have physical hard drive access too). They can insert the floppies, plug the pendrive, press the power button or just pull out the plug. They usually suffer the speaker noises and scare in front of the webcam.

At the same time, remote (or inactive users) shouldn’t be given the right to shut down the system unexpectedly, shout into the speakers, stream the user’s webcam or install Windows to his pendrive. I think that doesn’t need explaining.

I would like to shortly describe a few attempts to solve the problem and the issues with them.

Continue reading “Local device access — from plugdev to logind”

The sub-slots feature of EAPI 5 was announced as if it was the ultimate solution to the problem of SONAME changes on library upgrades. However, the longer I see it, the more I believe that it is not really a good solution, and that it misses the actual issue targeting somewhere nearby.

The issue is likely well-known by most of the Gentoo users. Every time a library changes its ABI, it changes the SONAME (the filename programs link to) to avoid breaking existing programs. When the package is upgraded, the new version is installed under the new name, and the old one is removed. As a direct result, all applications linking to the old version become broken and need to be rebuilt.

The classic way of handling this is to run the revdep-rebuild tool. It takes a while to scan the system with it but it supposedly finds all broken executables and initiates a rebuild of them. Of course, the system is in broken state until all relevant packages are rebuilt, and sometimes they just fail to build…

As you can guess, this is far from being perfect. That’s why people tried to find a better solution, and a few solutions were actually implemented. I’d like to describe them in a quasi-chronological order.

Continue reading “The pointless art of subslots”