Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Broadly speaking, staging WiFi drivers come in two flavors: (a) old dried gum from under the cafeteria table (drivers with a future), and (b) fresh vomit from the hung-over kid in your math class (those without a future).

-- Dan Williams

One man's obfuscation is another man's abstraction.

-- Frank Ch. Eigler

Writing a Linux distribution is hard. There's a huge range of interconnected dependencies. It takes a long time to learn how everything fits together, and fixing things properly rather than adding device-specific hacks often requires rewriting a lot of code. I'm sure Google will figure it out in time, and I'm also sure that the majority of their work is going into their UI rather than the underlying infrastructure. But even so, don't expect that you'll be able install Chromium OS on a random piece of hardware and have it work as well as, say, Fedora in the near future.

-- Matthew Garrett

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Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 25, 2009 21:38 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

A lot of development is driven by distributions. It is not *just* assembling existing components although that is obviously part of what is required.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 26, 2009 16:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yeah. You can recognise the bits that were written by the distros because
they are horribly overcomplicated, underdocumented, yet manage to omit
critical functionality because it's not new and shiny enough.

(sorry, having 'fun' with libvirt here, actually *less* painful than e.g.
network-manager but still unpleasant: is it so hard to e.g. pay attention
to supplementary groups rather than leaving your system VM user a member
of all root's groups? They've only been in Unix for thirty years, I can
understand ignoring them.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 27, 2009 9:52 UTC (Fri) by Yenya (subscriber, #52846) [Link]

I would add gdm > 2.20 as another example of the same approach.

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 27, 2009 14:12 UTC (Fri) by michich (subscriber, #17902) [Link]

libvirt [...] pay attention to supplementary groups rather than leaving your system VM user a member of all root's groups

Could you be more specific? Is it a reported bug?

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 27, 2009 22:48 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Not reported yet. I'm trying to come up with a patch first but glibc's
setgroups() is throwing 'invalid file descriptor' at me, unhelpful of it.

Basically, if I have a QEMU-running user

linux-vm:x:5000:5000:Linux VM user:/home/linux-vm:/bin/bash

and in /etc/group:

vm::91:linux-vm,windows-vm,nix,martin
linux-vm::5000:linux-vm

and in /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf:

user = linux-vm
group = linux-vm

I'd expect the systemwide qemu instance to acquire uid 5000, gid 5000,
secondary gid 91. But it doesn't: setgroups() is never called, so it
retains root's groups. Not so good. (Also entirely avoidable by changing
the group in qemu.conf, unless you want your images to be owned by a
different group than /dev/kvm is chgrped to, as I did.)

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 27, 2009 22:54 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I think that broad overgeneralization is just unfair and not true. Consider

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions

Quotes of the week

Posted Nov 28, 2009 0:01 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Of *course* it's not true. It was a *rant*, sheesh, they're supposed to be
ludicrously overblown for effect. :)

But after a week in which PolicyKit, ConsoleKit, HAL, DeviceKit-disks,
dbus *and* libvirt *all* hurled nasty bugs or failure modes of various
sorts at me, I was feeling a little annoyed (though many of these actually
have good docs and some, e.g. libvirt, are doing things that there was no
standard Unix way of doing beforehand). But the feeling of halfbakedness
is everywhere, even though of those packages I'm only tracking the
bleeding edge of libvirt... I never get that feeling from
Canonical-written stuff, because, uh, except for upstart I don't think
I've ever heard of any! ;}

(patches forthcoming for those bugs I can reliably reproduce, which isn't
all of them...)

(oh look kvm has just imploded. It's not a day with a 'y' in it without
another bug...)

Quotes of the week

Posted Dec 4, 2009 20:18 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Some distributions are even only compiled rather than assembled!