Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 7, 2014 9:56 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by dlang
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

> so if you define these baselines to include every package, nobody is going to install them (disk space)
Not every package, but at least _something_. And dedup partially solves the space problem.

> These baselines are no easier to standardize than the LSB or distros.
There are no standards right now. None. And LSB has shown us that when a group of vendors dictate their vision of a standard, distors simply ignore them.

The ecosystem of runtime might help to evolve at least a de-facto standard. I'm pretty sure that it can be done for the server-side (and let's face it, that's the main area of non-Android Linux use right now) but I'm less sure about the desktop.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 7, 2014 10:43 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

dedup only helps if the packages are exactly the same

>> These baselines are no easier to standardize than the LSB or distros.

> There are no standards right now. None. And LSB has shown us that when a group of vendors dictate their vision of a standard, distors simply ignore them.

so who is going to define the standards for the new approach? Every distro will just declare each of their releases to be a standard (and stop supporting them as quickly as they do today)

that gains nothing over the current status quo, except give legitimacy to people who don't want to upgrade

If the "standards" are going to be defined by anyone else, then they are going to be doing the same work that the distros are doing today, they will be just another distro group, with all the drawbacks of having to back-port security fixes (or fail to do so) that that implies.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 7, 2014 10:53 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

> so who is going to define the standards for the new approach? Every distro will just declare each of their releases to be a standard (and stop supporting them as quickly as they do today)
I'm hoping that the "market" is going to dictate the standard. Application developers will prefer to use a runtime that is well-supported and easy to maintain. And perhaps in time it will the become _the_ runtime.

> If the "standards" are going to be defined by anyone else, then they are going to be doing the same work that the distros are doing today, they will be just another distro group, with all the drawbacks of having to back-port security fixes (or fail to do so) that that implies.
Exactly. However, as an app developer I won't have to play against network effects of distributions - my software will run on ALL distributions supporting the /usr-based packaging.

I'm hoping that somebody like Debian or RHEL/CentOS can pick up the job of making runtimes. It shouldn't be hard, after all.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 7, 2014 11:18 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'm hoping that the "market" is going to dictate the standard. Application developers will prefer to use a runtime that is well-supported and easy to maintain. And perhaps in time it will the become _the_ runtime.

thanks for the laugh

there isn't going to be "the runtime" any more than there will be "the distro", for the same reason, different people want different things and have different tolerance of risky new features.

> I'm hoping that somebody like Debian or RHEL/CentOS can pick up the job of making runtimes. It shouldn't be hard, after all.

they already do, it's called their distro releases

> as an app developer I won't have to play against network effects of distributions - my software will run on ALL distributions supporting the /usr-based packaging.

no, your users may just have to download a few tens of GB of base packaging to run it instead.

Plus, if the baseline you pick has security problems, your users will blame you for them (because if you had picked a different base that didn't have those problems, their system wouldn't have been hit by X)

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 7, 2014 11:52 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

> there isn't going to be "the runtime" any more than there will be "the distro", for the same reason, different people want different things and have different tolerance of risky new features.
No. Most developers want pretty much the same basic feature set with small custom additions.

> they already do, it's called their distro releases
No they don't. Distro model is exclusionary - I can't just ship RHEL along with my software package (well, I can but it's impractical). So either I have to FORCE my clients to use a specific version of RHEL or I have to test my package on lots of different distros.

That's the crux of the problem - distros are wildly incompatible and there's no real hope that they'll merge any time soon.

> no, your users may just have to download a few tens of GB of base packaging to run it instead.
Bullshit. Minimal Docker image for Ubuntu is less than 100Mb and it contains lots of software. There's no reason at all for the basic system to be more than 100Mb in size.

>Plus, if the baseline you pick has security problems, your users will blame you for them (because if you had picked a different base that didn't have those problems, their system wouldn't have been hit by X)
Who cares. All existing software, except for high-profile stuff like browsers, is insecure like hell. Get over it.