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1. Jeeves (jeeves@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 11-Apr-2022 04:00:09 UTC Jeeves

   • Bernie

   @codewiz what are your thoughts on declarative package management? It seems like you should be able to layer a declarative interface on top of imperative package managers, but for some reason, it seems like not many people do that in practice.

   Context: trying to decide which Linux distro to use for my main development VM. I like the idea of declarative package management, but not sure if it's worth it committing to Nix/Guix/Silverblue, with the smaller ecosystem/community right now.

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 11-Apr-2022 04:00:25 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     @jeeves I never used Nix, but for at least one decade, the trend across all distros has been towards stateless root filesystem and removing those pesky post-install / uninstall scriptlets.

     The oldest mechanism is triggers: https://wiki.debian.org/DpkgTriggers

     The .d directory idiom eliminated tons of sketchy scripts that edit etc files.on package installation.

     Then came systemd, which eliminated all those distro-specific scripts to enable and disable daemons.

   • Jeeves (jeeves@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 11-Apr-2022 04:00:26 UTC Jeeves

     in reply to

     • Bernie

     @codewiz My goal is to be able to spin up a fresh dev VM easily from some config stored in a git repo instead of having to manually reinstall packages and stuff. Perhaps my Google-fu is too weak, but most of the info I'm finding basically boils down to "use Nix/Guix". How do people typically solve this with other distros?

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 11-Apr-2022 04:06:20 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     @jeeves Is adding users and groups still done by shell commands? Perhaps deb and rpm should add metadata to do that. That's a common source of non-determinism in traditional distros...

     And how's #Debian's multi-year deterministic builds initiative going?

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 11-Apr-2022 04:12:13 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     @jeeves Anyway, I'm thinking that we don't need brand new package managers and new distros.

     We just need to raise awareness that fully declarative packages are the cornerstone of reliable updates and rollbacks. And maybe tighten packaging policies to discourage or ban non-deterministic packages.

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 11-Apr-2022 04:22:38 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • Srevin Saju

     @jeeves Kernels will continue to be a pain point for a while, with those slow and failure-prone initramfs rebuilds... and the horror show of building proprietary drivers with dkms.

     @srevinsaju, how does #Fedora Silverblue handle this?

   • Bernie (codewiz@mstdn.io)'s status on Monday, 11-Apr-2022 08:25:12 UTC Bernie

     in reply to

     • Christian Horn

     @globalc And so you rebuild the image from scratch every time there are updates to apply?

     I guess rebuilding from scratch with kickstart is ok for small images. I guess you can still cache the downloaded packges... @jeeves

   • Christian Horn (globalc@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 11-Apr-2022 08:25:15 UTC Christian Horn

     in reply to

     • Bernie

     @jeeves
     Regarding 'other distros', at least in Fedora/centos/rhel, the idea is to deploy packages with kickstart and then do configmanagement like Ansible ontop.

     I tried Nixos the other day (linux unplugged did a challenge), but I will stick with normal distro + a bit config management. Also applicable to all distros.

     Colleagues used Silverblue, but the more devel work you do, so the more flexible you need your system, the less you will stick with that.
     @codewiz