OpenBSD is reimplementing rsync with a BSD license: openbsd.org/openrsync

@Kusalananda Just because they do not like GPL, or is there some other reason (the web-page is a bit empty)?

Hello Chichat !

@sebasth The former.

;-)

@StephenKitt Well, I'm excited about it...

Does git’s GPL license play a part in OpenBSD’s continued use of CVS? (Ignoring other aspects to the debate.)

@Kusalananda I’m teasing you! It’s nice to see enthusiasm.

@sebasth Well, the usual reasons for a BSD reimplementation of anything is that it hopefully means that commercial software eventually will adopt it and make things for (even non-Unix) people better.

@StephenKitt The main reason for staying with CVS has, as far as I've seen, been that there is no added benefits to moving to anything else, for the individual developers that are involved.

For people wanting to check out OpenBSD code via e.g. git, there is a github mirror somewhere.

@StephenKitt And yes, there is a policy of not including further GPL software in the base system.

@Kusalananda yeah from my pov being able to git clone isn’t significantly better than being able to cvs co, I like git when chaning code. But if CVS matches the developers’ work habits then there’s no reason to change, agreed; I was specifically wondering about the license.

@Kusalananda further GPL software? Do they have some, then? (I'm a bit surprised)

@Kusalananda OK, so if the devs did want to change, git wouldn’t be a candidate.

Or Mercurial for that matter, leaving Subversion, and that’s a pain to use so...

@ilkkachu I don't have a list, but gcc is still there, for example (albeit a very old version).

(Having been involved in projects which were effectively gutted despite having many commercial users, I’m somewhat dismayed by the BSD stance. But that’s just my opinion.)

The main compiler nowadays is clang, but I'm unsure if all architectures are using it by default. I'm actually uncertain what the license on clang is (and I'm on a phone, so won't check it right now).

@Kusalananda it’s BSD-style (specifically to allow commercial use).

@StephenKitt Yeah, and I totally understand that.

@Kusalananda oh right, The internet says OpenBSD switched to LLVM in 2017, so their version of gcc probably isn't that ancient

@ilkkachu 4.2.1 AFAIK

Um 4 something. They stopped updating at some point. There was a good blog written about it and how compilers were now expected to contain bugs.

4.2.1 was released in 2007.

Instead of updating, they fixed bugs and kept it working.

I'll retract that.

Given OpenBSD’s “big source tree” approach, staying on an old compiler is understandable even for non-license-related reasons: keeping up with changes to GCC takes quite a lot of time.

Also, things like compiler features used to defeat Meltdown came to mind, but I've no idea how the BSD's have dealt with that

@ilkkachu That was for amd64. As I said, there may still be one architecture that uses gcc,but I forget which one or whether they recently switch too.

@StephenKitt Also given the relative low number of developers, and even lower number of devs with compiler knowhow (about one or two).

@Kusalananda yes indeed!

bah, the Platforms -page doesn't say anything about compilers

@Kusalananda seems to be very subjective topic; I do not think I am the only one for who it is almost completely irrelevant if some non-free software is based on some other software which was distributed with permissive free license

@sebasth it doesn’t make much difference for end users until you want to make changes to your non-free software.

@sebasth It is very subjective, and it's up to Theo and the team of developers to decide how they are running the project and what they pour their time into.

I think one of the reasons for the BSD approach is the network effect: the more a piece of software is used, the more it becomes an unavoidable part of the software world.

The OpenBSD team is famously uninterested in what others think they should do.

@Kusalananda that’s the basic factor, indeed, and is why it’s meaningless to complain about what other people do.

There’s also no point in getting worked up about it ;-).

Ok, so it wasn't a blog post, it was a message to a mailing list: marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=137530560232232

“Mind you, I did not ask to end up maintaining the system compiler in OpenBSD.”

Yeah

That's, I think, the heart of it. There is none.

@Kusalananda well, arguably there are, but in the wrong place: each big Linux distro effectively maintains its own GCC LTS.

That whole email is very accurate unfortunately (I’d read it before).

Things have improved somewhat in GCC, but the constant churn (and regressions in less-used targets) are wearying.

(Based on my experience maintaining the Windows GCC-based toolchain, of all things, in Debian.)

@ilkkachu The release announcement for 6.3 says "clang(1) is now used as the system compiler on armv7, and it is also provided on sparc64" which leads me to believe that gcc is still default on sparc64. The text for 6.4 (current release) says nothing about any switches and I've not kept up to date with the mailing lists to know anything else.

@StephenKitt Oh.

@Kusalananda ok. Not that Sparc sounds much to be interested in any longer...

Tell that to people with sparc hardware :-)

@ilkkachu aw, they’re still unbeatable for making videos like youtube.com/watch?v=-jnWCYIvMck

@StephenKitt I don't have time to watch that now but the title sounds amusing :)

@StephenKitt I've worked on one of those! And I've studied the cache architecture of it (or a predecessor) at uni.

@ilkkachu yeah it’s rather crazy, it’s a nice video to keep around to show people who’ve never seen a “real system” (a computer so big and complex it needs another computer to boot it up).

@Kusalananda we had a few in one of my previous jobs, alongside a bunch of similar-size POWER beasts

Sun's NUMA architecture was able to migrate data in memory to the RAM closest to the CPU where it was used. I never fully understood how it worked, but it was impressive.

@Kusalananda I know someone who still has a Sun Netra T1 (or something like that). They could probably replace it with a Raspberry Pi which would a) be smaller and b) use less power. But I think they have it for the obscurity factor.

@Kusalananda in hardware, or was that done by the kernel?

@StephenKitt In hardware.

@Kusalananda nice!

... um, if I remember correctly, that is.

Not that I have any idea what they're running on it. Didn't Debian drop Sparc64, too, at some point, or does my memory fail me here?

Fun fact, Debian on sparc64 was the first free Unix I used.

@ilkkachu Debian on sparc64 is not an official port, but an unofficial one: debian.org/ports/#portlist-other

Ok, got to work...

@StephenKitt Gutted how?

@FaheemMitha all the development ended up shifting to the various proprietary forks

@Jesse_b are you guys HIPAA compliant? I can't seem to find any information on that.

@StephenKitt Could you give me some examples? That's not a terribly surprising development, though.

Such risks are inherent in a BSD style license.

Personally, I'd stick to the GPL if I was writing code. And actually, I've released code under the GPL. Though nobody cared.

@terdon I'm not really sure but honestly I don't think so

@Jesse_b Ah, crud. That'd be a dealbreaker for us.

I'm checking with our support team

Cool, thanks.

And Debian is sticking with GPL2+.

This is a curious notice.

What happened to the copyright after 1999? That was 10 years ago.

@FaheemMitha there’s none I’m particularly comfortable with discussing here.

@StephenKitt Ok.

In contrast, dpkg has a rather comprehensive copyright notice.

Has anyone here ever tried MariaDB?

@FaheemMitha yes, I have.

@StephenKitt How is it? Is there much difference between it and MySQL?

@FaheemMitha there wasn’t any for my use cases.

@StephenKitt Oh. Was there a reason to go with MariaDB instead of just MySQL then?

I've never used MySQL. But I've used PG a fair amount.

@FaheemMitha Debian stable has MariaDB, not MySQL.

@StephenKitt Oh, ok.

@FaheemMitha I use PostgreSQL more than MariaDB...

@StephenKitt Ok. I guess PG is a good choice.

Though I haven't used it for awhile.

Hey @terdon: One of the people on my sales team said:

@Jesse_b Yeah, that makes sense. I don't really know how you could be HIPAA compliant, but that's what I was asked. Thanks, I'll pass it along.

@terdon NP, TY! :)

@Jesse_b What's a BAA?

BTW, do cloud companies in the US have to conform to EU regulations? I'm particularly thinking of the new privacy ones.

@FaheemMitha I believe all company serving data in the EU do? I thought I heard something about them going after facebook or twitter or some US based tech company

@Jesse_b Does it matter if the company has presence in the EU or not?

@FaheemMitha I'm not sure. I thought it would apply to anyone that would provide services in the EU and am assuming they could (try at least) block those services if they were out of compliance. This is all based on very limited knowledge of the subject obtained through a few headlines and a clickbait article or two

@Jesse_b I guess they would not be required to unless they were doing business in the EU, but it's also true that if they were not doing business today, they could be doing so tomorrow.

@FaheemMitha Yeah we have four datacenters in europe and several european customers so I imagine we are in compliance

Brian Kernighan: "ed is the standard text editor"

@FaheemMitha No. Or not as I understand it, anyway. What matters is whether the services are being provided to customers in Europe. For example, I get GDPR notices when visiting US media sites (newspapers etc) because they detect my IP is in Europe.

@terdon Oh, ok.

@JeffSchaller It's actually quite significant that there are no fewer than three standard editors in the POSIX standard; ed, ex and vi.

That ought to cater to users for years to come.

@Kusalananda ...none of which many users know how to use

@ilkkachu Sucks to be them ;-)

@ilkkachu my mission becomes clear

@JeffSchaller oh dear, I've created a monster

@ilkkachu Well, they'll use nano, atom, pento, gatto, or whatever other name they come up with.

@ilkkachu a life-long educator

@Kusalananda yep, exactly

Gatto. That's actually quite a good name for a simple editor.

Here it is: alias gatto=cat

Motto: You'll learn to get it right on the 1st try!

THERE we go

yeah, and Real Men use telnet to IRC.

(the trouble is not getting too far from the terminal, you have to answer those PING queries)

Life's funny; if you had told me 3 years ago that I would be infamous on this site for using ed, I would not have believed you.

(generic "you")

@JeffSchaller So not a lifelong obsession, then?

I didn't know people used ed for actual work. I thought it was some archaic thing that just hung around for historical reasons. Like COBOL. Or C.

@FaheemMitha I have used edlin, back in the MS-DOS days, but I never scripted ed until I got going here, apparently circa February of 2017 (first ed/ex answer). Mostly a vi guy.

@JeffSchaller Fresh Fields and Pastures New?

@FaheemMitha the right combinations came together, I suppose!

I was half-expecting you to say you saw a set of indecipherable-looking symbols somewhere, and took that as a sign.

No, wait, that's Perl or regexes.

for ed, it'd have to be a vertical column of question marks.

@ilkkachu I would blame a zsh answer, but I don't think I'd seen enough yet. No, just Jeff's inscrutable brain. Looks like I started with ex, actually. We can blame don_crissti for the ed portion!

unix.stackexchange.com/posts/347469/revisions

@JeffSchaller Fine by me, as long as there's someone to blame!

I wonder how well it would work if I started answering scripting questions with Common Lisp.

speaking of zsh, there was this to (try to) decipher: ${(l:$#1::*:)1:$#1*3/4}

@ilkkachu smells like that echo obfuscation masking question

@JeffSchaller yep, it's that

indexing from 1 to length-of $1 ... magic happens ... and something-something 3/4's of the length of $1

@FaheemMitha I say "go for it!" I think the only downside would be caveating it with "and here's how to install it on your OS since it's not usually installed by default"

@JeffSchaller Well, binary packages do exist.

@FaheemMitha sure! It could be a copy/pastable list of instructions for the various OS package managers.

l:expr::string1::string2: -- Pad the resulting words on the left. Each word will be truncated if required and placed in a field expr characters wide.

and string1 is what it uses to pad

and of course the padding only happens after the substring of $1 is taken, though IMO the syntax doesn't make that really apparent

new syntax to me! whew! I remember shaking my head the first time I saw the spaceship operator (numeric ranges <->)

("spaceship operator", of course, coming from perl)

yeah, there's <=> in Perl 5, it's a bit different

Perl 6 probably has many different kinds of craft, and a mothership on top

I should learn perl6, but haven't

proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/…

hah! and how did I miss out on diy.despair.com!?

I maintain the correct answer to "so, uh, why can I ping 127.0.0.2" is "tell me why I should care" :-D. Because unless you write it up real good, I'm only going to forget it. Again.