Nah, 90% chance that they do something stupider.

I guess it depends how you look at it. From my point of view the speaker isn’t actually talking about themselves. That is the “royal” part. And I mean she does say “as if” to back up that yes, she is not actually including herself.

I use https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/ which is well, fantastic. I have it set up as the default diff for Git and it is really nice.

No, this is the right meaning royal we. If you say “we are going into battle” it is talking about the person being talked to not the person talking. So in this case “We don’t eat that” would be implying that the cat doesn’t eat that, not actually saying anything about the speaker even though “we” would imply they are included.

It’s also super locked down. You are only allowed to use it if Google or Apple says that your device is authorized. So no root, no custom ROMs. Unless your phone is owned by a corporation and that corporation is blessed by Apple or Google you are out of luck. (There are currently ways around this but the gaps are slowly being closed as older devices are phased out.)

I’m also not familiar. But my understanding is that the package maintainers should prevent this situation. Because otherwise even if there are package version dependencies (I don’t actually know if pacman does this) it would just block the update which results in a partial update which isn’t supported. For example if your theoretical unmaintained Firefox blocks the update of libssl but Python requires new functionality you would be stuck in dependency hell. Leaving this problem to the users just makes this problem worse. So the package maintainers need to sort something out.

It is a huge pain when it happens but tends to be pretty rare in practice. Typically they can just wait for software to update or ship a small patch to fix it. But in the worst case you need to maintain two versions of the common dependency. In lots of distros very common dependencies tend to get different packages for different major version for this reason. For example libfoo1 and libfoo2. Then there can be a period where both are supported while packages slowly move from one to the other.

IF no dependency tries to update too. Off course in that case I would stop. Without pacman -Sy, I never do that anyway, only -Syu.

That’s all you need to know. As long as you always use pacman -Syu you will be fine. pacman -Sy is the real problem. The wiki page is pretty clear about the sequences of commands that are problematic https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_maintenance#Partial_upgrades_are_unsupported.

Right? What i don’t understand is, when I uninstall with pacman -Rs firefox, delete the cached firefox package (only that file), then the system is in the same state as before I installed it. Then -S firefox should be okay, right? And it even looks up the new version.

This isn’t correct. It won’t look up the new version. Assuming that the system was in a consistent state it will download the exact same package that you deleted. The system only ever “updates” when you run pacman -Sy. Until you use -y all packages are effectively pinned at a specific version. If the version that gets installed is different than the one you removed it probably means that you were breaking the partial update rule previously.

But that is my point. Just running pacman -S firefox is fine as long as you didn’t run pacman -Sy at some point earlier. It won’t update anything, even dependencies. It will just install the version that matches your current package list and system including the right version of any dependencies if they aren’t already installed.

But that means if you already have Firefox installed it will do nothing.

I think you are a little confused at the problem here. The issue is that partial updates are not supported. The reason for this is very simple, Arch ensures that any given package list works on its own, but not that packages from different versions of the package list work together. So if Firefox depends on libssl the new Firefox package may depend on a new libssl function. If you install that version of Firefox without updating libssl it will cause problems.

There is no way around this limitation. If you install that new Firefox without he new libssl you will have problems. No matter how you try to rules lawyer it. Now 99% of the time this works. Typically packages don’t depend on new library functions right away. But sometimes they do, and that is why as a rule this is unsupported. You are welcome to try it, but if it breaks don’t complain to the devs, they never promised it would work. But this isn’t some policy where you can find a loophole. It is a technical limitation. If you manage to find a loophole people aren’t going to say “oh, that should work, let’s fix it” it will break and you will be on your own to fix it.

Focusing on your commands. The thing is that pacman -S firefox is always fine on its own. If Firefox is already installed it will do nothing, if it isn’t it will install the version from the current package list. Both of those operations are supported. Also pacman -Rs firefox && pacman -S firefox is really no different than just pacman -S firefox (other than potentially causing problems if the package can’t be allowed to be removed due to dependencies). So your command isn’t accomplishing anything even if it did somehow magically work around the rules.

What is really the problem is pacman -Sy. This command updates the package list without actually updating any packages. This will enter you system into a precarious state where any new package installed or updated (example our pacman -S firefox command form earlier) will be a version that is mismatched with the rest of your system. This is unsupported and will occasionally cause problems. Generally speaking you shouldn’t run pacman -Sy, any time you are using -Sy you should also be passing -u. This ensures that the package list and your installed packages are updated together.

/favicon.ico is the only “default” URL. /favicon.ico is usually not an actual “icon” type anymore but PNG or JPG (but with the same URL). Other than that you need to load the HTML and check for Link headers or <link rel=icon> elements. While URLs like /favicon.png may be popular they aren’t part of any actual protocol.

Sort of…

You can just hope that /favicon.ico works. But 1. it often doesn’t and 2. it is often of low quality.

To find a favicon on a modern site you need to load the HTML and check Link headers and <link rel=icon> elements. However you likely can’t do this client-side for most sites because of CORS. So you need some server (at the very least to strip CORS). That lets you get the URL but 1. you probably don’t want to have connections to external domains for user privacy and 2. some domains will have hot-link protection so you need to fetch the image via your server. You will also want to consider different image formats and sizes to serve the right image to the right client. On top of all of this the site may be using some sort of bot protection which you will have to fight. Google is almost always whitelisted. The site may also have temporary outages so having a cache would be nice, especially if that is almost always populated before you even know the domain exists.

At the end of the day you do want some sort of API. And while it isn’t complex it isn’t trivial. So it is nice to just let Google handle it. (Other than tracking risks, but you could proxy Google’s API.)

This is one of those things that must have been an absolute shit thing to discover the first time. Sure now we are ready and can prepare. But having to diagnose and improvise a solution would not be pleasant.

Of course nixpkgs has it. It was added a few years ago, I can’t vouch for if it is up to date or still working.

Does someone connecting to this have an IP highly correlated with your non-open network? Because if so then yes, that is fairly concerning.

I think this is a little confused. Unless your WiFi is open someone seeing your network can’t find out what the WAN IP is.

And getting your ip can connect the people directly to your box

“Connect” is a strong word here. Yeah, they can send traffic at it. But that shouldn’t do anything.

A trace route command to this IP could return intermediate equipment of your isp, helping to pinpoint your town or even your street.

This is the most reasonable concern. Depending on your ISP and location the IP itself or packet tracing you can get a pretty good idea of the user’s location.

Reminds me of this old ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLmIuW7yhBI

If the bottom can be seen at all that is completely unacceptable.

If a ceiling fan is on one of my boys will hide under chairs and couches and basically just skirt around from cover to cover. I think he thinks it is a bird.

It’s been fine. But I’m a decently well off young white dude who has never had trouble with borders anywhere. But I will still avoid it as much as I can.

This is what I moved to after Gandi started becoming shit and I have nothing bad to say about them yet.