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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • At some point, reading kernel code is easier than speculating. The answer is actually 3. there are multiple semantics for filesystems in the VFS layer of the kernel. For example, XFS is the most prominent user of the “async” semantics; all transactions in XFS are fundamentally asynchronous. By comparison, something like ext4 uses the “standard” semantics, where actions are synchronous. These correspond to filling out different parts of the VFS structs and registering different handlers for different actions; they might as well be two distinct APIs. It is generally suspected that all filesystem semantics are broken in different ways.

    Also, “hobby” is the wrong word; the lieutenant doing the yelling is paid to work on Linux and Debian. There are financial aspects to the situation; it’s not solely politics or machismo, although those are both on display.









  • I’d love to link you to their Wikipedia pages, but both of them are redlinked. As far as I can tell, Dr. V. Ronald was an educator who moved from Canada to the USA as part of the whole Xerox PARC thing and probably was valued for mainframe experience; does anybody have a full bio? The current maintainer is Ron Sunk, who did a full run at MIT up through postdoc before going to Red Hat. The names are a coincidence; runk implements what we now call Sunk summation, after Sunk’s thesis. (As you might guess, that’s an instance of Stigler’s law, since clearly Dr. Ronald discovered Sunk summation first!)

    Also, as long as we’re here, I want to empathize a little with Sunk. The GUIs that folks have placed on runk, like GNOME’s Gunk or Enlightenment’s enk, look very cool, and there’s rumors of an upcoming unified number-counting protocol that will put them all on equal ground. But @MossyFeathers@pawb.social wasn’t joking; Dr. Arnold’s code literally only reads punch cards, and there’s a façade to make it work on modern Linux and BSD transparently. It predates X11, if that’s any help. The tech debt is real.


  • Corbin@programming.devtoNix / NixOS@programming.devNix Release 2.24
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    5 months ago

    The nixpkgs community has been operating and maintaining nixpkgs-update since 2018. Earlier in the thread, you were shown the infamous Repology graph; it’s also linked from the nixpkgs-update documentation. We already have a concerted plan to offer the freshest ports tree in the world and are executing on it. If your particular pet package isn’t available, then contribute it yourself and the bot will ensure that it stays fresh and updated.


  • Because frankly, Ronald (the current maintainer, not the original author) is very competent. I say this as somebody who has personally been yelled at by Ronald at a kernel summit; I didn’t deserve it, but none of his technical points were wrong. I like to think of myself as the kind of person that, given enough time and documentation, can maintain anything; I think it’d still take three of me to do Ronald’s job. (Well, “job.” I think he technically works for Red Hat or something?) Not to excuse his conduct, just to explain why he’s not been replaced yet.





  • Search the manual for support32Bit configuration options, like hardware.opengl.support32Bit, hardware.pulseaudio.support32Bit, or services.pipewire.alsa.support32Bit. Any 32-bit games, as well as Steam itself, will need these to get their GL and PA/ALSA libraries set up properly.

    You may also want to look up what programs.nix-ld.enable does, although I hear that there’s a better harness builtin as of NixOS 24.05.

    All that said, everything Just Worked when I last tried. I haven’t run Steam in a while, though. I do use Retroarch and OBS without problems, though, streaming PS4 speedruns to Youtube or Peertube, and that all works out-of-box.