Re: [dev] Opinions on GNU stow

From: hiro <23hiro_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2017 09:33:44 +0200

> Symlinks have always been a hack due to Unix' lack of a proper
> namespaces approach. Plan 9 later fixed this by introducting a proper
> namespaces approach[1] - but even today unices (incl. Linux) have
> almost ignored the learnings of Plan 9 with some exceptions.

Yes, they are a hack, but linux will never be plan9, so I'll keep on
using them to approximate the plan9 binds.

Plan9 binds are also not very nice in practice with all the open and
walks not being done efficiently. A lot of roundtrips are wasted, so
there is potential, but nobody did the work yet. Till then symlinks
are at least performant.

> In terms of a packaging manager, I'm a proponent of the idea I
> introduced with stali as well. It does not require a package
> "manager", but uses git for the rootfs overlay instead. If you want a
> certain version of the system, you check out the required version from
> /.git.

9front practice agrees with this point. I really like the resulting experience.

> openoffice etc. I would try to adopt union mounting overlays into some

The reason symlinks are still being used is that unions on linux are
an even bigger, unstable piece of shit. The tinycorelinux people tried
them out for their package system and had to give up and use the
"hack" instead.
Received on Thu Aug 31 2017 - 09:33:44 CEST