Distribution quotes of the week [LWN.net]

These numbers are so inaccurate it's not really worth it to bother: should a DD who hasn't made an upload in ten years be counted? Should a non-DD non-DM contributor who maintains 86 packages for one and half decades? Then, don't forget that a good part of the credit should go to upstreams who actually wrote the software. And so on.

Thus, saying that Debian is produced "by almost a thousand active developers" is the most accurate figure we can honestly give.

— Adam Borowski

So while the use cases you mention should be taken into consideration, I don't believe they support the conclusion that we should continue to release Ubuntu on i386 in future releases.

[This] is a cost largely paid by Canonical (both in terms of infrastructure, and in terms of engineering work to keep the base system working). It's not very compelling to say that Canonical should continue bearing these costs out of pocket on the grounds that some other companies are unwilling to update their software to an ISA from this millennium :)

— Steve Langasek

Unfortunately, if we all stop using small distros five years from now there will likely be no brilliant new up-and-comers.

— Scott Gilbertson

For people who want to insist that Linux is not Unix; that's fine. I usually like to yank their chain by saying, tongue in cheek, that sure, Linux is not Unix, but it is largely compatible with Legacy Unix systems. :-)

— Ted Ts'o

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Distribution quotes of the week

Posted May 19, 2018 16:35 UTC (Sat) by rvfh (guest, #31018) [Link] (4 responses)

Steve Langasek seems to forget that some servers may have been installed long ago on 32-bit machines and moved to newer hardware without reinstalling - a nice feature of Linux. They then get upgraded over time from LTS to LTS, or from release to release. This is the case I was in at home until recently. In this case stopping support for i386 means forcing a reinstall as there is no support for "architecture switch" from i386 to amd64...

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted May 19, 2018 18:45 UTC (Sat) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link] (2 responses)

We haven't used Ubuntu for some time but Devuan is also Debian-based.

In our 64-bit installations we still use 32-bit Firefox and related libraries for better performance.

We seem to have more luck with wine32 than 64-bit Wine.

And perhaps of more relevance to Ubuntu, AFAIK there is still no 64-bit Steam client for Linux.

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted May 19, 2018 21:16 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

As a Steam user, all I have to say is:

~/.steam/ubuntu12_64$ file steamwebhelper
steamwebhelper: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, BuildID[sha1]=768cc2150a34c34669d7ec1676e3916618042848, not stripped

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted May 20, 2018 7:08 UTC (Sun) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

$ dpkg --print-architecture
amd64
$ dpkg --print-foreign-architectures
i386
$ apt-cache policy steam
steam:i386:
Installed: 1.0.0.49-1
Candidate: 1.0.0.49-1
Version table:
1.0.0.54-2 0
-500 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ stretch/non-free i386 Packages
*** 1.0.0.49-1 0
2000 http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ jessie/non-free i386 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
$ apt-cache policy steam:amd64
steam:
Installed: (none)
Candidate: (none)
Version table:
$ file /usr/games/steam.real
/usr/games/steam.real: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.32, BuildID[sha1]=a91742009a29dfbef1ed2fcf1ee77ef4f8152881, stripped

This is in Devuan Jessie from Debian Jessie. Stretch and Buster appear to be the similar. Does Ubuntu have a 64-bit Steam client launcher?

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted May 20, 2018 1:36 UTC (Sun) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

There are ways to upgrade from i386 to amd64 without reinstalling, they probably work on Ubuntu too:

https://wiki.debian.org/CrossGrading

Line endings

Posted May 21, 2018 20:58 UTC (Mon) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link]

We could distinguish between line ending conventions of "DEC TOPS-10" (leading to CP/M, MS-DOS, and Windows) and "MULTICS" (leading to Unix and eventually Linux) if we REALLY wanted to use "where did this convention come from". I think it'd be funny to say "CP/M line endings" :-). In any case, I prefer to say "Unix-like" instead of "Unix", it's not much longer and gets to the point.