Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica)

Posted Oct 1, 2019 22:32 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica) by jccleaver
Parent article: Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica)

> That's definitely pretty pathological -- I don't think I've ever had anything take longer than a minute and a half with pre-dnf yum, and that was on a full Fedora version upgrade.
This was Debian upgrade from stable to unstable, with many pinned packages and backports. So I guess it's probably not very representative, but on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible to get into this state more easily.

> It might have happened once on an attempted EL5-EL6 upgrade, but that's kind of orthogonal, though. The parallel to that would be an Android System Update, and my LG is usually out of commission for a good 30m for that no matter what.
My Pixel was able to update itself to a new Android major version in less than 5 min downtime, which I consider quite impressive.

> This is a good point, but it's also something that could be dealt with through tweaks into packaging for that "distro" and other concerns. Power outages during any script will be a bad thing, but will be a bad thing in most any case.
Or perhaps by switching to a different packages, like Snap?

Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica)

Posted Oct 6, 2019 16:50 UTC (Sun) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

The smartest move would be, if you're putting in so much effort in building a phone OS anyway, to fix APT - do what Red Hat did, take libsolv from the openSUSE folks. As openSUSE systems typically have over 20 repositories enabled, with some users running over than 200 repo's enabled*, zypper was early in its life confronted with the fact that it needed a much better solver than what apt and yum were getting away with. So, the story goes, SUSE management tasked the compiler developer team to develop a solver library that the zypper team could use. They build one. It was fast. End of story.

You know, it's open source. It can be adopted, as Red Hat did show. They still didn't do a very good job if you ask me (they just used the solver, not all of zypper, and dnf is quite an ugly pig compared to the easy cli of zypper) but it was a big improvement over the older versions. And while it'd be smart to just port over all of zypper (nicest package manager I've ever used), just taking libsolv would already be a big step up.

* I know this sounds insane to a Debian or Fedora users. But 1. the Open Build Service makes it possible to easily keep software fully build against a range of distribution versions so there are far more repo's available with special builds, older and newer versions, daily builds and so on for openSUSE and 2. people tend to do whatever is possible and the developers haven't thought about ;-)

Purism’s Librem 5 phone starts shipping—a fully open GNU/Linux phone (Ars Technica)

Posted Oct 7, 2019 20:56 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Sort of a tangent here, but what makes dnf a pig and zypper so nice? For a previous yum user, dnf is perfect since it's no different than before. Granted I've never used zypper itself (yast for the brief stint I had a suse install, but I went back to Fedora (10?) after a few weeks), so I just don't know.

I do agree that apt is obtuse and hard to use. The suite of tools hasn't had an overarching thought applied to it and I always have to look up how to ask things like "what files are in this package" and "what package contains this file". Auto-accept on no-new-dep installs and auto-enable of daemons has also been frustrating.