Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Posted Oct 29, 2022 14:04 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: Packaging Rust for Fedora by roc
Parent article: Packaging Rust for Fedora
Sure, but look on the question which started the whole thing:
> What advantage would that have over list of “kosher”, “tested” crates?Heck, it's obvious that curated approach (Linux distros) have quite thoroughly lost to uncurated one (AppStores for Android, iOS or even Windows): all the “good things” are not in curated Linux distros, they are elsewhere.
Sure, you need some way to find best things in the uncurated pile of things… but you have many ways to accomplish that. Reviews, “editor's choice”, heck, even tutorials like Practical Rust help you there.
Heck, the first community which went the cargo way, CTAN predates Linux distros! CPAN quickly followed and Perl community never felt the need to do what Linux distro guys demand, either.
If anything it's Linux distros who try to bend the whole world to their will, not the other way around. They have to accept that the problem they are trying to exist is very strange, unusual and yet narrow one: it just so happened that C and C++ have become standartized enough that it became a good idea to support many OSes and compilers (with autotools initially and with other tools later) and yet it never become unified enough to get analogue of CTAN/CPAN/CRAN/etc.
Most other communities are in one of two camps: either they are splintered enough for the distribution not to make any sense (like Forth or Scheme) or they coalesced around one, single, repo which makes “distro help” useless and pointless.
Posted Oct 29, 2022 15:56 UTC (Sat)
by amacater (subscriber, #790)
[Link] (12 responses)
All the good things are not necessarily in IOS/Windows - and the world is running almost entirely on Linux servers, Linux-based cloud ...
There are a few projects which seem to have tied themselves to one particular Linux distro (or worse, a particular version) - the one
Rust really does seem to want to do things it's own cargo way in spite of Linux distros and doesn't seem very curated at all by its own community. Fedora and Debian are trying to do the right thing to provide a basis for everything to work.
Posted Oct 29, 2022 16:26 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (11 responses)
Yes, some things are not available there. But for every example of avesome Linux-only app there are dozen of Windows-only or iOS-only apps. Which run docker images and Kubernetes pods. Google may solve the distributions problem by just offering specialized version of Android suitable for use on servers with full support for these. It's not, really interested, because when you containerise everything distros are not a big problem — but they are not a big help, either. Very similar problems to what the projects which don't support Windows and macOS (in that order) experience. It's not it's own cargo way. It's how everyone except C/C++ are doing things. Python and Ruby, Go and Java, Javascript and, yes, Rust… they are doing the same thing. Rust is not special. C and C++ are special. It's the only language (well, two languages, but very intervined) which is very popular, have tons of libraries, yet without it's own package manager (there are few, but most developers don't use them… yet) and without sane way of managing dependencies. Except neither of them even gives me an SDK suitable for use with, at least, few different versions of these distros. Well… Fedora gives me Flatpack SDK. Which is better than nothings, I guess. RHEL does, true, but it's entirely separate effort from Fedora. Fedora and Debian may pretend they are providing basis for everyone, but that's only true for C and C++, to some degree. Everyone else does not need or want that basis. Sure, distro developers may do whatever they want with Rust, Python or Java. It's open source software after all. But they shouldn't expect special treatment. They are not special. Well… maybe they are but that's only because they cause more pain that other choices of foundation.
Posted Oct 29, 2022 23:19 UTC (Sat)
by ilammy (subscriber, #145312)
[Link]
Linux distro is the de facto dependency manager for C, because it’s the only one that’s known to work on your system. In a way, that’s your only “sane” dependency management—for C, where basically everything is considered “insane” by the distros.
It causes an unfortunate side effect where application developers think that disto is their missing package manager for C libraries, for the lack of a better one. Then developers—and distro maintainers—start having thoughts that The Distro should be the package manager for every other language as well, because it is The Right Thing.
Well it’s not. The distro is for the system. Not for the applications developed on that system.
Sure, some applications are developed for the distro, but unless you’re a distro maintainer, you should not ever think that the distro is somehow obliged to provide you with packages for all dependencies under the sun that you might need.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 1:09 UTC (Sun)
by jkingweb (subscriber, #113039)
[Link] (9 responses)
Can you name me some awesome Windows-only applications from the last twenty years? Other than games, I had precisely zero by the time I left Windows (one of the reasons I jumped ship).
I'm genuinely curious to hear of some.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 10:43 UTC (Sun)
by ssokolow (guest, #94568)
[Link]
I keep a copy of Exact Audio Copy under Wine because, every time I need to back up some music CDs, I find that whipper, the closest Linux runner-up, still has an "if we can't do this perfectly, barf rather than supporting an option to accept a best effort" approach to aging music CDs and it's just flat-out incompatible with track 1 being a data track.
Project64 has broader compatibility with the ROMs I dumped from my childhood N64 carts (thank you, Retrode) than Mupen64Plus or the Mupen64Plus cores for Retroatch. (Notably, Donkey Kong 64.)
There's never been a Linux tool capable of creating Stuffit archives for test fodder (and Smith Micro end-of-lifed it), so I had to eBay some copies of Stuffit and run them in Wine to produce legally redistributable test archives.
The open-source asset extractors for things like Unity lag way behind the Windows freeware tools in supporting modern versions of Unity whenever I find myself needing that to format-shift soundtracks I've already paid for once.
...and that's not including hardware-specific stuff where the protocols have never been reverse-engineered like the Musicsoft Downloader for loading MIDI files onto Yamaha keyboards via SysEx messages.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 11:58 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (7 responses)
It's funny that you have quoted the sentence without reading it. Not that I haven't said that for every awesome Linux-only app there are dozen of awesome Windows-only or iOS-only apps. Most of the apps are not, really, all that awesome. They are just available for Windows and/or Android/iOS only… and you need them. Want to backup documents your children created on their calculator in college? Here's your app, pick whether you need EXE, MSI or DMG. Need to deal with bank? Here's your Windows-only app. Need to check in on your plane? Oh, sorry, web site is broken for last month, but here's you Android/iOS app. Taxes? You know what to do, right? It's not that there are too many amazing programs for Windows or iOS. It's that lots of apps which you need to be member of the society are not available under Linux. Sure, you can deal with it. You can ask your friends to help install Linux on your TI Nspire CX II CAS… but, frankly, that phrase even sounds silly. If you are hermit and actively try to avoid everything not available on Linux it may work… till you would try to find a job and would get instructions in mail which would include link to Windows-only special “safe” browser… Windows-only, of course. This all comes down to the fact that for decades it was possible to develop and deliver app for Windows and macOS, but before flatpack and snap it wasn't possible to do for Linux. Today… it's possible, sure, but… development process for these apps is entirely separated from development of apps and libraries for the linux distros, why would you need to bother about that one at all? It would be as silly as if Android guys would have demanded that Rust developers would have abandoned Why can not Linux distros do that?
Posted Oct 30, 2022 17:35 UTC (Sun)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (5 responses)
> It's not that there are too many amazing programs for Windows or iOS. It's that lots of apps which you need to be member of the society are not available under Linux.
This is ... quite depressing.
It also really drives home the points that the FSF has been trying to make about the problems that arise from depending upon proprietary software and, more recently, proprietary services.
I consider myself fortunate that I've still been able to opt out of all of the dreck. I don't know how much longer that will be the case, but I try hard to put my money where my mouth is, and do what I can to ensure a couple of niche corners still can be met with software that respects its users' freedom.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 21:46 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
But many services were always proproetary! Your bank always belonged to someone and water comes into your house by pipes owned by someone. That's the thing: world have changed and very often software is used as part of something bigger. Think about that damn TI Nspire CX II CAS: I only need to have program which can talk to it while I use it. Maybe 4 or 5 years while it's needed for college. After that I have no need neither for it nor for the program which can talk to it. And I'm pretty sure in 2 or 3 years community would crack it's protocol (like it did with previous models) and would support it. When I would no longer need it. And the same with everything. Most programs which have no analogues under Linux don't have analogues because they are only usable for a limited time. They are part of some offer which was always proprietary — only in XX century that some offer included the need to go somewhere and today you can use program to do the same thing from home. Why would they support more than bare minimum? And bare minimum naturally leads to proprietary programs and then only for popular platforms where ongoing support is not too onerous.
Posted Oct 31, 2022 7:15 UTC (Mon)
by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
[Link] (3 responses)
It's also not true. The specific calculator model he's complaining about has a Linux file manager that works with it. Every bank I've ever encountered has a website that works in a Linux web browser. No bank I've ever encountered has ever tried to push a Windows-only app on me. Airline web sites don't go down for months at a time, because that would be very expensive for the airline as it would lead to fewer ticket sales. From every airline website I've ever used, you can print your boarding pass from the website and take the printed page with you to board, meaning all you need to buy the ticket and get on the plane is a web browser, and it can be a Linux web browser if you want. Regarding taxes, the IRS has an official online filing portal called "Free Fillable Forms" which I can attest works just fine from a Linux browser.
Now, that website is actually run not by the IRS but by some proprietary shitware company, I think Intuit, for stupid political reasons, and it's not the most user friendly tax filing option out there. I do believe there is an unfilled need for open source tax filing software, and I am actually working on filling that need. While I don't have anything remotely usable yet, but this team does: https://ustaxes.org And you don't need either of our products because Free Fillable Forms does work just fine, even if it is clunky.
The Linux desktop world is not perfect -- nothing ever is -- but, contrary to what khim claims, it's in very good condition.
Posted Oct 31, 2022 7:54 UTC (Mon)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
We can quibble over the specifics of what he said, but it's clearly been trending in that direction for some time, with mobile-optional becoming mobile-first and trending towards mobile-only, and locked-down-mobile-only at that. Even before smartphones became common, there were examples of banking sites in some countries (South Korea?) and plenty of governmental sites elsewhere requiring specific ActiveX plugins, which effectively locked everyone into IE on Windows.
> The Linux desktop world is not perfect -- nothing ever is -- but, contrary to what khim claims, it's in very good condition.
Oh, I completely agree -- I've been using Linux as my only desktop environment since at least 1998 -- but I still have a Windows VM I need to fire up once in a while to deal with some stuff that WINE probably won't ever handle [1].
[1] Anything involving device drivers or badly-written [2] vendor firmware updating tools, for example
Posted Oct 31, 2022 13:31 UTC (Mon)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Where is it and how can I find it? I only know that tilp still doesn't support it, but I admit, it was easier for me to just use Windows that to look around on unofficial forums for the version which may or may not work. Except you are a small business, then they would give you Windows-only bank client and if you are lucky key for that bank client would be on USB and not on floppy. I remember how even LWN itself struggled with that and while maybe, just maybe they solved that problem, it took years.
Posted Sep 14, 2023 2:12 UTC (Thu)
by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
[Link]
Posted Oct 31, 2022 6:52 UTC (Mon)
by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648)
[Link]
Calculator: https://www.reddit.com/r/nspire/comments/k5v7vy/cxcx2linu...
Taxes: It's not tax season but previous tax season you had a multitude of online options for filing taxes, some free.
Online Free: Credit Karma Tax, Free Fillable Forms
I am actually working on a libre tax software solution, but haven't had much time for it recently due to my day job: https://github.com/linuxrocks123/taxfloss
If you are at all interested, I'll push my 2021 forms to GitHub. They're not right now. The program has no user interface, but the domain-specific language works so if you declare variables with your input you can actually use it. (I did.) You still have to fill in the forms by hand by copying the output, though.
These people are taking a different approach and have a UI and something more usable currently: https://ustaxes.org/start
Posted Oct 30, 2022 2:23 UTC (Sun)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link] (3 responses)
Uncurated ones? Once upon a time, all programs were installed on Windows or MacOS by going to their website and downloading them or buying a physical copy. Now iPhones and some versions of Windows only install from the vetted app store, and Android can get pretty pushy about it. Yes, there's a lot less control over what goes into those AppStores than what goes into a Linux distro, but there's a lot more control by Microsoft and co. than there was previously. So not obvious at all.
Also note that the appstores carry binary apps that carry all of the non-system libraries with them. Flatpak is one thing, but a pile of source code that downloads a bunch of other source code and may or may not compile is quite another. Downloaded C code, in my experience, loves to fail in the middle of compilation with some obscure error from the compiler that the random user has no idea how to fix. Rust is probably better in some ways, but code is not going to beat someone compiling it on your arch on your distro and hopefully doing a smoke test and you downloading that for ease of use.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 11:22 UTC (Sun)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (2 responses)
Yes. Maybe we have different definition of word “curated”? I go with normal one: carefully chosen and thoughtfully organized or presented. And chosen is critical part. But there are, really, no curation. There are rules, sure. But they are uniform. There are no selection process which may decide whether fork of some product is original enough to be included. Programs are not renamed simply because some obscure program took their name first. You can find curation in these stores, too, BTW. The list of libraries included in Android, iOS, macOS, Windows… it's curated by any definition. But distros manage to combine worst sides of curated and uncurated process! You have to convince them to include your app or library by doing certain, quite atrocious, things… and you you can not be certain that it would be available in that distribution! It must be installed separately and you can not even easily direct user to the store where he needs to just click “Install” to get another app! The rest of your story talks about how good curated distro is for the user who is also a developer… and it's not incorrect. For the user who is also a developer distros are really cool. The only problem: these are extreme rarity novadays. And for everyone else… distros are awful. They only offer curated software thus you can not get best software (it's not included for various reasons, most often because it just doesn't exist in version for GNU/Linux) and they only offer curated set of libraries thus you often find out that library you want or need is not included, or included in wrong version or can not be included because distro decided that it's duplicating functionality of some other library… Looking on calendar. Is it 2022 or 2002? That issue is solved in the entirely different way today. Linux distros were never a good way to do that because you have to compile something on your arch and your distro (and you forgot your version of that distro, BTW) — and that never happens. There are just too many distros, too many versions to support all that zoo. Instead you just use docker image to have predictable and reproducible builds. That's how everyone except people who have already decided to spend insane amount of time to deal with bazillion linux distributions for no good reason are doing it today.
Posted Oct 30, 2022 20:50 UTC (Sun)
by dvdeug (guest, #10998)
[Link]
Given that Apple advertises "the apps we offer are held to the highest standards for privacy, security, and content. Because we offer nearly two million apps — and we want you to feel good about using every single one of them.", "Over 215K submissions rejected last year for violating privacy guidelines." and "Over 1M submissions rejected for objectionable, harmful, unsafe, or illegal content.", all on the front page of the app store, I think Apple is calling themselves curated.
It is fairly easy to become a Debian developer, and they can upload just about anything. Neither the Debian archive or the Apple app store presume to offer only the best word processor or best puzzle game; just all such programs that fit the basic rules and someone with right credentials packaged. I think you're making a lot more distinction then actually exists.
>Programs are not renamed simply because some obscure program took their name first.
Note that apt install snap doesn't install the appstore, it installs the general purpose gene finding program by the same name. You can make a trademark claim on the appstores, as well; note that a search for Tetris on Debian comes up with a lot more stuff calling itself Tetris then the Google Store.
>You have to convince them to include your app or library by doing certain, quite atrocious, things… and you you can not be certain that it would be available in that distribution! It must be installed separately and you can not even easily direct user to the store where he needs to just click “Install” to get another app!
I don't understand what this means.
> The rest of your story talks about how good curated distro is for the user who is also a developer
No. I run the mencoder contained in Debian despite the fact the mplayer developers fume about it. I could download the version from mplayerhq.hu and compile, and have in previous days, but don't feel like jumping through the extra hoops. Non-developer users would find compiling it much harder. Distros mean that you can install a program and it will work on your architecture, with your libraries, and not overwrite anything. (Note that snapd installs /usr/bin/snap, and snap doesn't. a compromise when snapd was added to the archive.) This is the same thing that the other Appstores offer, that any system that delivers source code or generic Linux binaries doesn't. This is what users need whether or not they're developers.
> (it's not included for various reasons, most often because it just doesn't exist in version for GNU/Linux)
? Are you complaining because Linux distributions don't package software that doesn't work on Linux?
> they only offer curated set of libraries thus you often find out that library you want or need is not included, or included in wrong version or can not be included because distro decided that it's duplicating functionality of some other library…
Non-developers never want to install a library. That's part of the advantage of distributions, that they never have to worry about installing libraries, they're automatically handled for them. They also keep the libraries up-to-date. so you aren't running an version of the libraries with known issues.
Again, with Debian, I don't recall them rejecting any library because it's duplicating functionality of some other library. If it wants to use the same file names, yes.
> Linux distros were never a good way to do that
To do what? Distros offer code compiled on your arch on your distro on the version of the distro with hopefully at least a smoke test. They do that job quite well.
> Instead you just use docker image to have predictable and reproducible builds.
From what I understand, docker images let you put down a turnkey database or web server on a server. They don't do anything for running various programs on the same X or Wayland screen. There are systems that run a program in its own box with its own libraries, but I have 1906 non-library Debian packages, and don't want to host all those libraries for each one.
Posted Nov 2, 2022 15:11 UTC (Wed)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
There is no such selection process distro side either, the sole selection process is finding enough people motivated to build an n-th version of the same thing, and the only way to fail this process is to make building the n-th version too hard compared to the benefits it provided over the (n-1) other versions.
Which, is really easy to do when you are pulling hundreds of other modules which are all needing review individually.
Packaging Rust for Fedora
that strikes me is gnuradio and that causes them problems.
> All the good things are not necessarily in IOS/Windows
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
rustup and cargo and switched to blueprints. They, as developers of platform, do their own thing, Rust developers offer tools for app developers)… and nobody tries to swallow the whole world.Packaging Rust for Fedora
> It also really drives home the points that the FSF has been trying to make about the problems that arise from depending upon proprietary software and, more recently, proprietary services.
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
[2] That's probably redundant
> The specific calculator model he's complaining about has a Linux file manager that works with it.
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Online Pay: TurboTax, H&R Block
Packaging Rust for Fedora
> Uncurated ones?
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora
Packaging Rust for Fedora