About arch's own following of the arch way...

mhertz · 2011-05-28 18:42:48

First, let me just start off by saying that i'm extremelly happy and gratefull for arch, so thanks to all the devs!

Now, the point of this post is to get something of my chest which i've been thinking about alot, and that is the design philosophy of arch and specifically in comparison to the arch way.

My point here is that arch isn't supposed to patch for extra functionality, by their own words, but solelly for avoiding breakage in a rolling release environment, but then I see things like e.g. grub patched with ext4 support?

Then, and imho even worse, xorg patched to show a different desktop background and the kernel's tux logo exchanged with an arch logo!

These are just a few examples...

Again, i'm not complaining here and appreciate all the devs efforts, but I just wish that arch would be more strict in upholding it's own groundrules, i.e. provide vanilla packages and only patch for avoiding breakage and then let the ppl utilise abs for all their custom functionality...

I can of course live with the above, since arch in all is so great, but again, just wanted to get this off my chest!

-Martin.

Last edited by mhertz (2011-05-28 18:50:29)

metre · 2011-05-28 19:32:20

You can read this topic too: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=118922
It went a little off-topic

lchr · 2011-05-28 19:45:55

I wish I led a life in which this was something that registered on my mental radar as something to be concerned about, haha.

Ramses de Norre · 2011-05-28 20:07:14

I don't think anyone benefits from taking a fundamentalist attitude towards any philosophy. Everyone sees in the world what such a state of mind does to mankind.

In particular for arch, one should in every case outweigh the pros and cons, using the arch philosophy as a guideline and gauge, and then take a decision. And I really can't imagine anyone being truly offended by the arch logo on boot-up or by ext4 support in grub, though if there are people who are, they should probably start their own distro and formulate their own philosophy to which to adhere strictly and rigorously.
I'm glad the arch devs are more loose with theirs

olive · 2011-05-28 20:56:56

Ramses de Norre wrote:

In particular for arch, one should in every case outweigh the pros and cons, using the arch philosophy as a guideline and gauge, and then take a decision. And I really can't imagine anyone being truly offended by the arch logo on boot-up or by ext4 support in grub, though if there are people who are, they should probably start their own distro and formulate their own philosophy to which to adhere strictly and rigorously.
I'm glad the arch devs are more loose with theirs

I would agree with the first post. Arch should ship vanilla software. Some of the extra functionality might be useful but I think it is not the purpose of a distribution to do this. I think if we really think an added functionality is useful then it would be better to start a fork of the project so that any distribution could use it in a constant way.

Although "truly offended" is a big word, I do not like adding feature like ext4 in grub. Why? Suppose I find a bug in grub (I have not but imagine). Can I report the bug upstream? The first things I have to do to report bugs upstream is to ensure that I run the software provided by upstream; which would not be the case. Slackware does apply the KISS more than arch. I used it but was tired of having to track dependencies and not having a comprehensive repository.

jnguyen · 2011-05-28 20:59:15

I challenge everyone to find a distribution that doesn't patch grub to support ext4. I don't think it would be hard to sort out bugs in a patched grub...

Last edited by jnguyen (2011-05-28 20:59:35)

karol · 2011-05-28 21:00:48

olive wrote:

Although "truly offended" is a big word, I do not like adding feature like ext4 in grub. Why? Suppose I find a bug in grub (I have not but imagine). Can I report the bug upstream? The first things I have to do to report bugs upstream is to ensure that I run the software provided by upstream; which would not be the case.

True, but bugs can be reported here.

Natanji · 2011-05-28 21:21:50

Okay, this might sound stupid to ask but...
I have no clue where on bootup you see an Arch logo. And on my xorg I also never saw an Arch logo...

...how can I enable that?

Ramses de Norre · 2011-05-28 21:32:59

Natanji wrote:

Okay, this might sound stupid to ask but...
I have no clue where on bootup you see an Arch logo. And on my xorg I also never saw an Arch logo...
...how can I enable that?

You don't see it when you use KMS, it looked nice in the old UMS days

eldragon · 2011-05-28 21:33:56

Natanji wrote:

Okay, this might sound stupid to ask but...
I have no clue where on bootup you see an Arch logo. And on my xorg I also never saw an Arch logo...
...how can I enable that?

since KMS you cant unless you build your display modules in the kernel.

if you dont use KMS, a VGA=XXX would suffice

PReP · 2011-05-28 21:52:30

I agree with the views about strict adherence (blind) towards a set philisophy is a bad thing, overall.

The thing is, there can not be such a thing were there is a 100% keeping towards some pre-set rule, and expect that to be sensible in the future, in were unforseen things happen, and will always happen.
Being strict like that would always end up making something stale, out of order or not working as well.

Every arising circumstance, must be viewed as something unique, and every time, a unique and new decision should be made as what is most sane.

The patched images, i don't care that much, though it's nice to have some small symbols to point towards what distro one is using.

The EXT4 for grub-legacy, on the other hand, is a very sensible decision - which, i would say, has sane and complete benifits, and no issues
- so the only reason to object to that, is "because it is a law/rule/said in the past to be that way" <-- this is how things get stuck,
and Arch is to neat to end up there

karol · 2011-05-28 22:26:01

eldragon wrote:

Natanji wrote:
Okay, this might sound stupid to ask but...
I have no clue where on bootup you see an Arch logo. And on my xorg I also never saw an Arch logo...
...how can I enable that?

since KMS you cant unless you build your display modules in the kernel.
if you dont use KMS, a VGA=XXX would suffice

Even if you use KMS you can temporarily add 'nomodeset' to the kernel line. X wont' boot, so be sure to boot into console.

mhertz · 2011-05-28 22:35:36

Thanks for your replies. all!

I guess we're just different, then, as most of you thinks it's fine...

To me it's not a matter of not liking ext4 support, or not liking the arch logo, and I would also set the X background back to black myself if arch didn't allready do that with a patch, but it honestly bothers me whenever a set of rules is set but then not lived up to.

If those rules were never made, then I wouldn't be "whining" here

If not feeling deeply for the slackware-kinda no-patching philosophy, then I of course understand that this dosen't bother you, but to me, then this was one of the reasons which made me go to arch in the first place!

I guess im just the sort of person which find strict adherence towards a set philisophy fundamental!

From Arch's official about page and wiki:

Arch strives to keep its packages as close to the original upstream software as possible. Patches are applied only when necessary to ensure an application compiles and runs correctly with the other packages installed on an up-to-date Arch system.

Arch provides non-patched, vanilla software; packages are offered from pure upstream sources, how the author originally intended it be distributed. Patching only occurs in extremely rare cases, to prevent severe breakage in the instance of version mismatches that may occur within a rolling release model

Last edited by mhertz (2011-05-28 22:43:25)

tomk · 2011-05-28 22:56:38

You can discuss it here, of course, but if you want a response that actually matters, post a bug report, and see what the devs say.

stqn · 2011-05-29 05:50:17

PReP wrote:

The EXT4 for grub-legacy, on the other hand, is a very sensible decision - which, i would say, has sane and complete benifits, and no issues

I can see two reasons besides the "can't report bugs to upstream" one:
- any patch might introduce bugs
- it makes Arch users believe that grub supports ext4, which might cause them troubles when they install another distro that doesn't patch grub.

Now, I'm still glad that ext4 is supported, although I could definitively live with an ext2 /boot...

Natanji · 2011-05-29 08:01:43

I think the decision to include ext4 support is very sensible, considering a typical setup without an extra boot partition:
Without it, users could easily convert their ext3 / filesystem to ext4 and be left without a possibility to boot their system afterwards.

The ext3->ext4 file system conversion is quite easy/simple and recommended like, all over the net. If you are not aware that grub might not have ext4 support, this can break your system. Recovering the system would then require building grub from AUR using only the Arch boot disc, which really is no fun at all.

Last edited by Natanji (2011-05-29 08:02:25)

droog · 2011-05-29 08:23:52

The dependencies are of much more concern than the couple patches that you mentioned.
Pretty much anything that you install any more, drags in all of gnome and kde plus everything else possible.

Completely opposite of the vanilla/simple approach --enable gnomepulseaudiokde /.

jasonwryan · 2011-05-29 08:35:07

droog wrote:

The dependencies are of much more concern than the couple patches that you mentioned.
Pretty much anything that you install any more, drags in all of gnome and kde plus everything else possible.
Completely opposite of the vanilla/simple approach --enable gnomepulseaudiokde /.

Really? All of Gnome or KDE? That's either outrageous hyperbole or a ham-fisted troll...

karol · 2011-05-29 08:37:12

droog wrote:

The dependencies are of much more concern than the couple patches that you mentioned.
Pretty much anything that you install any more, drags in all of gnome and kde plus everything else possible.
Completely opposite of the vanilla/simple approach --enable gnomepulseaudiokde /.

Can you give some examples?

droog · 2011-05-29 08:58:18

karol wrote:

Can you give some examples?

No I just made that up.

ngoonee · 2011-05-29 08:58:56

karol wrote:

droog wrote:
The dependencies are of much more concern than the couple patches that you mentioned.
Pretty much anything that you install any more, drags in all of gnome and kde plus everything else possible.
Completely opposite of the vanilla/simple approach --enable gnomepulseaudiokde /.
Can you give some examples?

Yes I'd like to know as well, seeing as most upstream projects have dropped support for such compile-time switches and for a while we were maintaining our own custom patches (at least for gnome) specifically to keep pulseaudio from being a dependency.

droog · 2011-05-29 09:01:54

ngoonee wrote:

Yes I'd like to know as well, seeing as most upstream projects have dropped support for such compile-time switches and for a while we were maintaining our own custom patches (at least for gnome) specifically to keep pulseaudio from being a dependency.

When I was on the mailing list yesterday this came up a few times. I don't see how it's not seen.

droog · 2011-05-29 09:10:11

heres a title of one. I don't have the time to figure out dependency chains.
[arch-general] farsight2/gstreamer dependencies pull a lot of gnome related

a lot of non vanilla dependencies drag in a ton of stuff though.

/edit

jasonwryan wrote:

Really? All of Gnome or KDE? That's either outrageous hyperbole or a ham-fisted troll...

you've been here long enough to notice the dependencies are pretty bad lately? I'm not being a troll at all.

Last edited by droog (2011-05-29 09:13:56)

ngoonee · 2011-05-29 09:14:24

droog wrote:

heres a title of one. I don't have the time to figure out dependency chains.
[arch-general] farsight2/gstreamer dependencies pull a lot of gnome related
a lot of non vanilla dependencies drag in a ton of stuff though.

Neither do you have time to read threads, it seems. This is an upstream change, not an Arch change. http://cgit.collabora.co.uk/git/farsigh … ree/README

Awebb · 2011-05-29 10:50:57

ABS tells me that there are 1175 patches applied to packages all over the Arch Linux repositories (64bit Arch with multilib enabled).

$ find /var/abs -iname *.patch | wc -l
1175

Since there are packages with more than one patch, we might find out that 701 packages have been patched.

$ find /var/abs -iname *.patch | awk 'BEGIN {FS = "/"} {print $5}' | uniq | wc -l
701

I can see a total of 10524 packages in the pacman database.

$ pacman -Ss | wc -l
10524

That means about 6.67% of all packages have patches at all. I think this is a good ratio.

Good thing about this thread:
1. I had my morning exercise.
2. I finally know that grub has ext4 support, so I don't need to stick with the extra /boot partition on my netbook anymore (hooray).

Arch Linux

#1 2011-05-28 18:42:48

About arch's own following of the arch way...

#2 2011-05-28 19:32:20

Re: About arch's own following of the arch way...

#3 2011-05-28 19:45:55

Re: About arch's own following of the arch way...

#4 2011-05-28 20:07:14

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#5 2011-05-28 20:56:56

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#6 2011-05-28 20:59:15

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#7 2011-05-28 21:00:48

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#8 2011-05-28 21:21:50

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