[stali] Purpose (was Re: [dev] Re: [stali] updating package source)

From: FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2016 12:17:45 +0200

Hello fellow hackers,

> concentrate on the essence here, this is all a waste of time.
        - hiro

to be fair and meaning no offense to anybody, I think stali in
general is a waste of time. It is too ambitious given the low manpower
and the hypetrain, if I may call it so, is just pissing people off when
they hear
        1. how long ago this has been announced, still being vaporware
           to this day
        2. how "many" people are working on it
        3. how overambitious it is (rewriting makefiles for base, ...).

When discussing this topic so openly I often have to hear that I was
just being grumpy and not for the project. Of course I'd love to see a
suckless Linux distribution which actually does things differently and
is not just a rebranded Debian with slight modifications.

However, I know first hand what a dump of work package maintainership
is, and I know many people here do as well. The Morpheus package
scripts were a good approach to the problem but the manpower involved
in porting this stuff and making it work was huge, and it takes all
your honesty to admit that we at suckless are just not enough people to
pull this off. It may have worked 10-20 years ago when it wasn't all
such a mess, but just look at how the situation is today.

The only Linux package manager which really does dependencies right is
portage, even when the dependency trees are huge. And it also makes it
really easy and straightforward to create cross compilers, which is
usually a huge mess.

I see suckless's purpose in creating simple, high quality and useful
user software. The reason why it works out and has worked out with so
few people is because we keep our code simple and thus can bear
maintainership even of multiple projects at once for one person. With
package management, this is different. If you stick your hands in a
pile of cow feces, your hands will get dirty, no matter what you do.
Get real guys, there are enough projects with TODO items in our repos;
we really need to stop doing things that are definitely above our
heads. Not because they are too "difficult", but because they just eat
up time, unless you spit out makefiles in 10 seconds each. Rewriting
the build systems for other projects and maintaining them along the
line is borderline insane.

With best regards

FRIGN

-- 
FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de>
Received on Thu Sep 15 2016 - 12:17:45 CEST

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