RFC: Queries about Arch culture and community

Bralkein · 2009-08-09 11:15:16

If you wouldn't use the label "conservative" (which I don't mean in the political sense as used in the USA), what sort of label, if any, would you use? Arch does hew fairly closely to The Arch Way, but as you and Alan rightly point out, it changes over time. Is there a succinct word that could adequately describe this?

I think that conservative is completely the wrong word to use, no offence. I always thought that Arch was actually a pretty radical and forward-thinking distribution, in fact that is one of the things that attracted me to it in the first place. Conservatism (even outside of a political context) implies a very cautious approach to change, with a preference towards keeping things as they are. I think a distro which could accurately be described in this way would be Slackware, which is a great distro but I doubt anyone could argue that it isn't a bit set in its ways! Perhaps conservative is a word that could accurately describe Debian, too, now I come to think of it.

In Arch it always seemed to me that if someone had a better idea of how to do something or a plan to make some useful changes, then such ideas would always be entertained and given a very fair hearing. It's just that the Arch community has a very clear sense of the purpose of Arch, and are unwilling to compromise that purpose in order to e.g. gain more maintream acceptance. Furthermore, although the Arch Way is oft-cited and adhered to quite strongly, it is hardly a strict set of arbitrary tenets or traditional values, rather it is the guiding philosophy which shapes Arch into what it is.

To answer your question then, I myself would say that the thoughts of the Arch community are guided by a strong ideological commitment to the Arch Way, which is essentially a reductionist design philosophy. Not quite the succinct word you were looking for perhaps, but then you're the writer so maybe you can squeeze it down a bit

P.S. Good luck with your article, hope it turns out well!

lseubert · 2009-08-09 11:37:47

Sakurina wrote:

I'm pretty new to Arch, came in with a Mac + Debian background around last October, but after trying several distributions, I keep coming back to Arch due to its thriving and interesting community, as well as its overall philosophy.

Really? Me too! I started running Macs back in 1985 - the original ones with 128k of RAM and a nine inch black and white screen. You know that famous Apple "1984" commercial? That was the Mac that I ran. I stopped running Macs almost 10 years ago when I switched over to Linux. Before that original Mac, I ran a TRS-80 Color Computer 1 with the glorious Motorola 6809 CPU, running at damn near 1 megahertz! That one came with 4K of RAM, and I upgraded to 32K. Hooooowheeeee I was the l33t haxxor then with that much RAM to play with! And then came the day when I upgraded my magnetic storage from a cassette tape recorder to a 5 1/4" 180 kilobyte, single-side, single-density floppy drive. Whooooosh! Wow that system was fast.

I have also used Debian in the past, and while I don't run it anymore, I respect it still. 27,000+ packages running on 11 different hardware platforums with two different kernels - what an incredible accomplishment! From a technical perspective, there are a lot of things that Debian does right. Culturally? Eh, not so much.

I believe Arch users acknowledge how much of a resource the wiki and the AUR are, so they are more likely to contribute back to them to help their fellow Arch users.

Good point, people appreciate those resources and so want to contribute back. The fact that it is very easy to contribute back helps a lot.

I don't believe the developers behind Arch would change the philosophy just for the sake of getting more users;

Totally agree. I don't see that ever happening.

We tend to get along well with each other, because fundamentally we are all passionate about a Linux distribution we love, and we're more likely to spend time collectively expressing our superiority than to argue about silly things.

While those statements are true about Arch users, they don't quite explain the harmonious community. Gentoo and Debian users are passionate and love their distros, and like to express their collective superiority; but they definitely find time to argue about things. Something else seems to set Arch apart in this regard. It is a fascinating phenomenon.

People can be cooler than Phrakture? This is news to me.

I know. I blaspheme. I'm just a rabble rouser

lseubert · 2009-08-09 11:43:18

Allan wrote:

No, you missed the point. There are still packages that have not been rebuilt since the policy change. We usually just rebuild as needed and not do a mass rebuild for a minor change in packaging policy.

Ah, OK. Now I get it.

So, when there is a minor policy change, there is no mass rebuild. And it is then up to the individual Arch packagers to decide whether or not to tweak their PKGBUILDs and upload them?

Also, where does Arch stand in relation to FHS? What about LSB? Obviously Arch blows it on the .rpm requirement, but does it otherwise conform to LSB?

Allan · 2009-08-09 11:50:50

lseubert wrote:

So, when there is a minor policy change, there is no mass rebuild. And it is then up to the individual Arch packagers to decide whether or not to tweak their PKGBUILDs and upload them?

Correct, for minor changes.

lseubert wrote:

Also, where does Arch stand in relation to FHS? What about LSB? Obviously Arch blows it on the .rpm requirement, but does it otherwise conform to LSB?

We try to conform to the FHS and anything not conforming is probably considered a bug. I don't think anybody has actually looked into what would be needed for compliance to the LSB. Saying that, I know some packages are in [core] specifically for that. It would be interesting if someone compiled a list of what needed done.

lseubert · 2009-08-09 12:05:21

iphitus wrote:

4. I think what helps here is that the 'barrier to entry' for participating in Arch is incredibly low due to three things - a) AUR, b) PKGBUILDs are trivial, c) Documentation is detailed, examples are abundant.

While the 'barrier to entry' to participating in Arch is very low, on the flip side, there is a somewhat high barrier to entry with Arch itself. The initial installation and configuration takes a bit of patient thought and work. Interesting - the price of admission is high, but after that, it is all ease of entry.

The AUR provides a way for everyone to be developers. There's popular packages there maintained by users who only maintain a couple of packages of interest. Through comments and notification they can interact with users, discuss and improve packages. These small contributions often give rise to further contributions and a greater understanding of Arch - and then we get TU's and Devs.

Yeah, I devoted a paragraph to that AUR uploader -> TU -> Arch developer process. AUR provides a lot of benefits to Arch, even though its packages aren't official.

5) Chakra scenario. I think we've already had it. In the last 2-3 years there's been a huge influx of Ubuntu users, and users who heard arch was "simple" (though they expected a different simple). Not all of them have stayed, but many have and learnt about Linux in the process* - which I reckon is very awesome. As a result of this influx I've found the documentation has improved phenomenally. One of Arch's biggest criticisms was once documentation - now it's a strength.

That's an interesting point. In my research, I came across old reviews from a number of years back which commented on "spotty documentation". Yes, things have definitely changed.

Also, there seems to be a large influx of Gentoo users too, and Gentoo is known for really good documentation. Do you think the former Gentoo users contributed to Arch wiki excellence as well?

* I've learnt more about Linux using Arch than any other distro. I did an LFS before Arch, however it's so closely guided that it just ends up as continual copy paste. I actually did half of the LFS before I even knew how to copy paste under Linux.

Yeah, LFS is very mechanical. It tells you what to do, but not why, or about other options. I don't fault the LFS developers for this at all - putting together LFS is hard enough work as it is. It is tough enough to meticulously tell people what to do, line by line. To then include material about why such and so should be done this way and not another way - yeesh! It would quintuple the length of their documentation.

lseubert · 2009-08-09 12:24:53

Bralkein wrote:

I think that conservative is completely the wrong word to use, no offence.

No offense taken at all. My purpose is posting these questions and responding is to get a better sense on some of these issues, and to question some of my assumptions and understanding. And if 'conservative' isn't quite the right word, I don't mind changing it. After considering this thread, I do think it is the wrong word, but I haven't come up with a good replacement yet.

And now that I think about it, how could one call a rolling release distro 'conservative'? Geese - it changes all the time!

I always thought that Arch was actually a pretty radical and forward-thinking distribution, in fact that is one of the things that attracted me to it in the first place. Conservatism (even outside of a political context) implies a very cautious approach to change, with a preference towards keeping things as they are. I think a distro which could accurately be described in this way would be Slackware, which is a great distro but I doubt anyone could argue that it isn't a bit set in its ways! Perhaps conservative is a word that could accurately describe Debian, too, now I come to think of it.

I would have agreed with that characterization of Slackware up until a few months ago. Patrick Volkerding is going nuts over there! (And I mean that in a nice way.) Slack has added two, count 'em, two new officialy supported hardware architectures - x86_64 and ARM. I find that to be very impressive change.

Debian is, I suppose, conservative. Its culture is - that's for sure. Technically, it changes over time, albeit slowly. But then, when you compile that many packages on that many hardware platforms, some inertia is to be expected. I am actually in awe when Debian releases a new version, even when they're late. It is such a mammoth task.

To answer your question then, I myself would say that the thoughts of the Arch community are guided by a strong ideological commitment to the Arch Way, which is essentially a reductionist design philosophy. Not quite the succinct word you were looking for perhaps, but then you're the writer so maybe you can squeeze it down a bit

Oh, getting closer. The phrase 'reductionist design philosophy' is quite pithy. I am just finishing up the rough draft, and now I am fussing about going back through and editing for brevity. I tend to be overly wordy in my writing. That is why I am carrying on about finding the right 'word'. Cuz the right 'phrase' would just be too long

lseubert · 2009-08-09 13:06:03

Allan wrote:

We try to conform to the FHS and anything not conforming is probably considered a bug. I don't think anybody has actually looked into what would be needed for compliance to the LSB. Saying that, I know some packages are in [core] specifically for that. It would be interesting if someone compiled a list of what needed done.

I wonder about LSB compliance. I recall reading a few years ago that the LSB test suite was rather flawed. (Here is the article.) In order to pass the LSB tests, some distros were changing their configurations in unusual ways, because otherwise the flawed LSB test would falsely red flag the distro in some way. Also, apparently LSB paid little mind to the concerns raised by the Debian community because Debian wasn't a sponsoring corporate member of LSB, which is rather unfair and short sighted given Debian's widespread usage as a server OS. These issues may have been fixed with the more recent LSB test suites - I don't know. I may compile the test suite and run it and see what turns up.

As for compiling a list of what needs doing for FHS and LSB compliance, well, that is why I find Debian tools like lintian rather interesting. The tools take care of all of that sort of stuff, along with checking a package for Debian Policy conformity. Although, apparently Lintian checks a little too closely - it is recommended to not turn on 'verbose' mode

Alan, let me ask you this. IIRC, FHS and LSB require system wide config files to go under the /etc directory. Now, with the Arch package for PostgreSQL, the postgresql.conf file is in the /var/lib/postgres/data directory, not the /etc directory. I believe, but I am not sure, that this is the default location set by PostgreSQL. Some distros shift this conf file over to /etc, but in so doing they are altering upstream's default settings. How does Arch resolve such issues? In this case, the Arch developer chose to go with vanilla default settings, in keeping with the KISS principle of Arch - Arch avoids altering upstream source code and configuration. On the other hand, as you point out, Arch tries to comply with FHS. And it would 'seem' that PostgreSQL Arch packaging violates the FHS. Does Arch have a policy to help consistently resolve such issues?

(Please note - I am not complaining about the PostgreSQL Arch packager's choices here - I am just citing it as an example that I am familiar with. If I were complaining, I would do so by filing a bug.)

Arch Linux

#26 2009-08-09 11:15:16

Re: RFC: Queries about Arch culture and community

#27 2009-08-09 11:37:47

Re: RFC: Queries about Arch culture and community

#28 2009-08-09 11:43:18

Re: RFC: Queries about Arch culture and community

#29 2009-08-09 11:50:50

Re: RFC: Queries about Arch culture and community

#30 2009-08-09 12:05:21

Re: RFC: Queries about Arch culture and community

#31 2009-08-09 12:24:53

Re: RFC: Queries about Arch culture and community

#32 2009-08-09 13:06:03

Re: RFC: Queries about Arch culture and community

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