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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • All of these packaging systems have plenty of tutorials. Speaking from experience, many maintainers were not developers when they started maintaining packages for distros other than the official distros. I have worked with several maintainers who do work in tech and know socially several who had no background. This could be a great place for you to start!

    You bother because FOSS is as much paying it forward as it is getting shit for free.




  • I like how simple it is. It’s made distrohopping very, very simple for me over the years. The only pet machines I have are my actual dev boxes. The rest are cattle I manage with other tools. Galaxy has also made it much simpler to consume other Ansible which used to be really annoying.

    I’m on the fence about Nix. When I first saw years ago it was yet another package management system. I’ve seen enough interesting things with it now that I’ll probably try it out the next time I want to rebuild my configs from scratch.


  • I really like Ansible and have used it for my personal dotfiles for years. I don’t think it’s a silver bullet and I’m aware of a lot of the criticism. Containerization or immutable infra solves more production problems so I don’t really use it much at work.

    At least in the devops/SRE circles I work in, we know there are different tools for different jobs. While we might fight about which is the best, I haven’t seen the ossification you’re describing.





  • The only other time rewriting history might be bad is when you’re working on a shared branch, which is the point of not rewriting main. If you are working solo on a branch, its history is only what you merge into main so it doesn’t fucking matter at all. If you’re not working solo, maybe you need to adopt a similar process or look at how you’re not working solo. The only time I touch another dev’s branch is at the PR stage and only for quick corrections or missing knowledge so it doesn’t matter if they rebased before or honestly rebase after before the final merge.



  • If a repo is very popular, it should have a lot of forks. The higher the upstream popularity, the higher the downstream popularity. When a dev makes a claim that there are a ton of malicious forks stealing IP, we can vet that claim by looking at the forks that respect the upstream. Big projects have a big community with big forks with many stars. The popular downstreams drive traffic to the upstream.

    In this case, we have a couple hundred direct forks. That’s not a ton. Out of those, only three have stars. All of them only have one star. At face value, that could imply a few things: the repo is not very popular, the community is centralized around the upstream, or something else along those lines. Comparing this to other open source projects, our initial conclusion is that this is not a hugely popular repo and does not get a lot of development outside of its incredibly niche community.

    Occam’s razor is a tool, not objective truth. Based on the facts as we can see them, this focus on forking from the dev is much more indicative of a burnout spiral, incredibly common in the FOSS community, than nefarious actors. If we see receipts, eg a collection of takedown requests on malicious forks attempting to claim ownership of the code, our analysis falls apart. That’s still a possibility, however remote.


  • There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born.

    There are three visible forks that have any stars. All of them have one star. You’re telling me that a project that is so widely and maliciously repackaged has no normal forks with more than one star? Is this tech that only bad actors want to use and has no following in the open source community?

    Where are these evil forks, how do we actually know they’re forks, and why are they still up if they’re breaking license?

    Edit: Here is a fork with 200+ stars that isn’t a direct GH fork. Given its premise is an opinionated and branded Floorp, is it morally wrong for its maintainers to not contribute to Floorp (assuming they don’t only for the sake of argument)? Does your answer apply to fediverse server owners (eg Mastodon, Lemmy) whose premise is hosting an opinionated and branded instance often explicitly without the technical skill to suggest patches?





  • Absolutes in programming tend to lead to bad designs. This is more a “I’m gonna stir up some shit on Twitter” post than real wisdom.

    • No microservices usually leads to bloated, tightly coupled logic that ignores business domains
    • No monoliths usually leads to sprawling microservice deployments with tightly coupled dependencies and flavor-of-the-week new ones
    • No Kubernetes usually leads to VPS pets or crazy obstacle courses trying to get SSL termination without a million fucking dependencies in a cloud container orchestration system that isn’t as good as Kubernetes
    • All Kubernetes usually leads to huge SRE costs for a tiny app

    The same shit happened last summer when AWS came out with their “we dropped microservices for a monolith and look at our speed increase” article which ignored good design principles. Sometimes you should split things over business domains so you can deploy and code independently. Sometimes Kubernetes is the best way to handle your scale needs. The stories we normally read are about people doing it wrong (eg AWS making a bunch of microservices inside a domain sending fucking gigs of data between what should have been functions in a single service). Inexperienced folks don’t always know when to move from their minimum viable solution to something that can scale. That doesn’t mean you remove these things, it means you train on when you need them.

    Should we abandon design patterns because singletons or flywheels aren’t the correct solution all of the time?



  • I agree with that. I think that there are people that want that deeper level. Most of your users are not going to fit into that, though. If you’re only supporting your power users, you will eventually wither and die as your power users leave.

    I first bought a book with Red Hat Linux 6 or 7 in the early aughties (pre-RHEL/Fedora split). While I have actively participated in the technical improvements of project since then, I have typically stayed out of the social aspects.