Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 1:11 UTC (Mon) by ssokolow (guest, #94568)
In reply to: Packaging Rust for Fedora by ceplm
Parent article: Packaging Rust for Fedora

I find arguing in the direction of "but servers" kind of odd, given that languages like Go and Rust which statically link everything are effectively a codification of the "I can't wait for your perfect solution anymore. I'll fix it." reaction that is containerizing everything using Docker.

It's "We can't wait for Hurd. Let's put GNU userland on top of this thing called Linux instead" all over again.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 6:12 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (5 responses)

And enterprise distributors of Linux (and I do NOT speak for my employer and this is not the information about our customers, just what I’ve heard) now have number of large clients who are quite nervous that they have tons of Docker (et al.) containers full of unmaintained stuff they have not complete control over. And yes, of course, whatever I said about Rust applies to Go/NodeJS and other unmaintained stuff in containers as well.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 7:43 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (4 responses)

> And enterprise distributors of Linux (and I do NOT speak for my employer and this is not the information about our customers, just what I’ve heard) now have number of large clients who are quite nervous that they have tons of Docker (et al.) containers full of unmaintained stuff they have not complete control over.

And before it was a ton of unmaintained crap smeared over RHEL servers with who-knows-what custom configs hidden inside /var/share/somewhere/etc/why/thefuck/its/here, all placed there by a "user-friendly" installer script. I wish I were exaggerating.

At least Docker images are a step up because the Docker files list the commands needed to build the image.

There's no solution to unmaintained old software except making maintenance easier.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 18:15 UTC (Mon) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (3 responses)

You assume that the Dockerfiles exist. I have many-an-unmaintained image with no Dockerfile. There's no rebuilding or fixing this. You have to do the same kind of reverse engineering you did for unmaintained VMs or physical servers.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 18:35 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

How is that different from what any other industry faces?

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 18:41 UTC (Mon) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

It isn't. I'm saying that container appliances are just as screwed as VM appliances.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 19:53 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Even having a layered image is better than having one huge VM. Having a Dockerfile also does make it easier for vendors to rebuild the software. Also, Docker makes it easier to sandbox such applications and manage them centrally.

It's not perfect, of course, but it's strictly better than the status quo ante. Even if not by a lot.

Packaging Rust for Fedora

Posted Oct 31, 2022 7:46 UTC (Mon) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

go is made by google, which doesn't really care about good practices and has no problem to rebuild and maintain all the dependencies. Others might be using at their own risk.