/dev/chat

Gilles

19:00

@slm the motivation was to incite regulars to ask more questions

strugee

interesting reading found from ownCloud's "design" page: jancborchardt.net/usability-in-free-software

terdon

The objective here is "Good" questions, as in >1 or >0 UV.

Gilles

the badge was mostly designed for low-traffic sites. U&L doesn't need it

derobert

@terdon -1, does not show research effort :-P

terdon

@slm Isn't that just us?

derobert

19:01

@slm The goal is to incentivize me to ask questions.

Gilles

@terdon 10k only

derobert

Presumably, all us folks who pretty much only answer questions indeed come across problems.... but we just answer them ourselves.

slm

@terdon is it? I hadn't seen it until today.

Faheem Mitha

What do you guys think?

Sorry, I can't quote standard, I suggest you to ask similar question (You may create a shorter example just with template<typename T, template<typename T> class C> class Test;) with language-lawyer tag — Jarod42 2 mins ago

Gilles

@derobert yes, but not everyone then contributes in the form of asking and answering

@FaheemMitha ummm, don't use C++? That's always a safe bet

Faheem Mitha

19:04

@Gilles In general, a good plan. Unfortunately, not always possible.

slm

@derobert I'll often see a Q and kick myself for not thinking to ask it...

derobert

I want to know why people bother editing things like unix.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/52170 ...

@slm Odd. I don't see this.

Ramesh

To make even closed questions look good, may be?

derobert

@Gilles you sure its not mod-only? I'm not getting the message to see all my history.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Upset by bad grammar?

Gilles

19:07

@derobert the link in the landing page is mod-only, but there's a link to the same page at the bottom of the history tab for 10k

slm

It's been closed (the reopen triggered by the edit) but I still see it.

terdon

AH, OK.

derobert

Except that someone upvoted that question (why?!), it'd be destined for the Roomba anyway.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert what do you think? stackoverflow.com/questions/24527433/…

derobert

stackoverflow.com/tags/language-lawyer/info seems appropriate. It's been a while since I've been active on SO.

Braiam

19:18

@derobert if you see many of the AU questions of today (about a year and newer) you will ask yourself the same question again... and again... and yet again

strugee

I've posted an answer, but for what it's worth - in the future, don't do that. just buy some CDs. they're really cheap nowadays. — strugee 1 min ago

/me rolls eyes

I mean really. don't do that.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert ok. 2 answers this year.

Does anyone think it is weird that clang compiles and links against gcc compiled libs without fuss? And seems to run too. Just tried it.

strugee

@FaheemMitha nah, that's what it's designed for

Faheem Mitha

@strugee It was?

Gilles

@strugee don't do what?

strugee

19:25

@Gilles don't put a live image on a partition. just buy some freaking CDs.

Gilles

@strugee why not? why?

strugee

@FaheemMitha yeah. Clang isn't just a compiler, it's part of a whole infrastructure (LLVM).

Ulrich Dangel

you can put a grml iso on the hd and can load it directly via grub

derobert

@FaheemMitha Not really. The ABI is standardized.

Ulrich Dangel

.oO(spamming about grml)

strugee

19:26

@Gilles just seems like a bad idea. and it's not that much hassle to get a CD.

Faheem Mitha

@strugee Yes, I'm aware of that.

strugee

you run into problems like OP...

@FaheemMitha ah

Ulrich Dangel

@derobert though name mangling is afaik not standardized afaik for cpp?

Faheem Mitha

@UlrichDangel Tried that once. Didn't work.

Ulrich Dangel

@FaheemMitha grml or booting it from grub?

Faheem Mitha

19:27

@derobert I didn't think anything about C++ was standardized in practice. Except the standard itself.

@UlrichDangel Booting from grub. But I had a relatively unusual setup. LVM + sw raid.

Might work now, though.

Ulrich Dangel

@FaheemMitha this should be supported nowadays with grml-rescueboot

derobert

@UlrichDangel I think it is now. For a long time it wasn't, and even libraries built with different gcc versions couldn't link with each other (unless they did extern "C")

Faheem Mitha

@UlrichDangel maybe

Ulrich Dangel

@FaheemMitha at least based on my tests (/me wrote that part ;))

strugee

why is grml so special?

I just use the Arch CD, works fine

it does use the grml zsh configs, though. cause they're awesome.

Faheem Mitha

19:31

@UlrichDangel I was wondering why your name sounded familiar. You are one of the grml devs? Work with mika?

Ulrich Dangel

@strugee i may be biased, but it has some nice properties such as autoamted script execution, very easy to customize, you can start a ssh server automatically just via a commandline, you can modify the commandline via a script and create a repackaged version etc.

Faheem Mitha

@strugee It's pretty good stuff.

Have you ever tried it?

Ulrich Dangel

@FaheemMitha i was one of the developers, i am no longer part of the team. but yeah i am working with mika all the time

Faheem Mitha

@UlrichDangel Ah, so too busy with other stuff?

strugee

@derobert @UlrichDangel @FaheemMitha harmful.cat-v.org/software/dynamic-linking

@FaheemMitha not really. (except, as I said, the shell configs :P)

@UlrichDangel huh

interesting, although I think I'll stick with the Arch CD for now

Ulrich Dangel

19:33

@strugee it can be easily used for example to do test the hw, inventorize it before deployment, or you can easily provide a very simple branded live image

Faheem Mitha

@strugee Hmm. What's the relevance of this?

strugee

@FaheemMitha just interesting reading, since we were talking about linking

you don't have to read it although I recommend it

@UlrichDangel oooo, nice!

Faheem Mitha

@strugee Ok. We were?

I thought one centralized libraries for security reasons, among others.

derobert

@strugee I'd love to know how those folks would maintain a distro without dynamic linking. You'd spend a lot of time recompiling (or at least relinking)...

strugee

@FaheemMitha weren't we?

when we were talking about C++

Faheem Mitha

19:35

@strugee My short-term memory must be going.

Ulrich Dangel

@strugee ok i promise i stop after this but: blog.grml.org/archives/… or blog.grml.org/archives/…

Faheem Mitha

@strugee Oh, the clang vs gcc thing? Well, yes, I guess.

strugee

@FaheemMitha yah

sort of

/me shrugs

Faheem Mitha

Still a little surprised by that. I thought clang had its own C++ libraries.

derobert

@strugee am I missing something, or did you link us to a discussion among crazy people?

strugee

19:37

@derobert the point is that if you can't recompile reverse dependencies, then you don't have the right system. it isn't a problem with static linking, it's a problem with your system.

@derobert no I kind of did

the Plan 9 people can be fairly radical

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Quite

strugee

but I think it's interesting

food for thought

derobert

@strugee Yeah. Except when someone finds the next security bug in libjpeg or zlib, I'd prefer to not have to recompile (or at least re-link) half the system.

Faheem Mitha

Dynamic linking strikes me as a necessary evil. It isn't perfect, but what is the alternative?

@derobert Exactly. Like I said above

5 mins ago, by Faheem Mitha

I thought one centralized libraries for security reasons, among others.

strugee

@UlrichDangel grml-chroot == arch-chroot

@derobert yeah. I dunno, it's a tradeoff.

derobert

19:40

Not to mention, that the distro folks would have to do that for each new version of those libraries uploaded. Having binaries linked against a splattering of versions, based on when the package was last uploaded, would be a nightmare both for security and GPL compliance.

strugee

@derobert I don't understand what you're saying

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Well, license issues in general.

Ulrich Dangel

@strugee yeah nowadays i probalby would push for nsenter anyway and tbh arch-chroot probably is a little bit better than grml-chroot

strugee

@UlrichDangel the rest look nice though

nsenter?

derobert

@strugee When the distro switches from libfoo 1.0.0 to libfoo 1.0.1, unless the rebuild (re-link) everything depending on libfoo, they'll have packages with both 1.0.0 and 1.0.1.

Faheem Mitha

19:42

@derobert Well, they'd have to relink on every library upgrade. For every package that depends on that library.

Ulrich Dangel

@strugee hm arch-chroot doesnt mount proc or sys or dev?

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Well, I think they'd have to relink everything for consistency.

Otherwise it would just get insane. Well, more insane.

derobert

Yep. So you'd be constantly relinking the entire distro

strugee

@UlrichDangel no, it does all of those

@derobert yeah, you re-link

Faheem Mitha

Maybe the Gentoo folks wouldn't mind that.

Ulrich Dangel

19:43

@strugee sorry i meant nspawn - see freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-nspawn.html and based on github.com/falconindy/arch-install-scripts/blob/master/… it seems it doesnt do it?

strugee

@UlrichDangel ah yeah

falconindy is an Arch guy

nspawn started in Arch and got upstreamed

I think

maybe?

derobert

That becomes very hard if you have a non-trivial sized distro. Especially since makefiles don't often support that; you'll have to patch a lot (almsot all?) of them, or alternatively make clean and recompile.

strugee

@UlrichDangel no, everything gets mounted

some get mount --binded though

@derobert yeah, but mkfiles do

derobert

I wonder what the size of a full build tree (with everything built) of, say, Debian is. Must be huge!

strugee

:P

Plan 9 is extremely small

even the kernel is small

you can actually read through the entire kernel in a couple of days. unlike the Linux kernel, which would take a lifetime

Ulrich Dangel

19:46

@derobert source is 71gb and amd64 is 94gb

strugee

@UlrichDangel he meant with build artifacts

derobert

@UlrichDangel That small? A kernel build tree alone is 13gb

Ulrich Dangel

@strugee yeah isnt it basically 71gb + 94gb?

@derobert according to google ;0 debian source mirror size

and debian amd64 mirror size

derobert

That doesn't include all the .o files, etc. (because they're not part of the packages)

strugee

@UlrichDangel ah, probably

Ulrich Dangel

19:48

but the o files will be part of the bin, so you can just multiply it by two if you want

derobert

No, .o files are much larger than the linked binary. Especially the linked, stripped binary.

Ulrich Dangel

but they ship debug symbols anyway

Faheem Mitha

@UlrichDangel That's it for Debian? Sounds on the small side.

Ulrich Dangel

for some of them ;)

hm there are afaik some machines with an unpacked source archive

strugee

also, I know we're kind of done with the linking discussion, but I'd just like to point out that the top email on the Plan 9 page was from Rob Pike

derobert

19:50

anthony@Zia:~/src$ du -cm *3.14.4*deb
1       linux-firmware-image-3.14.4-p+_3.14.4-p+-5_amd64.deb
7       linux-headers-3.14.4-p+_3.14.4-p+-5_amd64.deb
30      linux-image-3.14.4-p+_3.14.4-p+-5_amd64.deb
318     linux-image-3.14.4-p+-dbg_3.14.4-p+-5_amd64.deb
1       linux-libc-dev_3.14.4-p+-5_amd64.deb
355     total

that's what comes out of a 13G kernel build tree, around 355 MB of binary packages

strugee

anyway, I'm off to lunch. see you all soon.

derobert

The source is another 80MB or so.

So, the build tree is around 30x larger than source + all binaries. No idea if that's typical or not.

Faheem Mitha

@derobert generally built source is much larger than binaries. I do a fair amount of building from source when backporting.

derobert

@FaheemMitha Yep. But built source is what you'd have to keep around to re-link if you're not doing dynamic linking (well, or you'd have to completely recompile).

Faheem Mitha

@derobert Yes, I don't see how it would be practical.

derobert

20:06

@strugee fun! unix.stackexchange.com/questions/140423/…

Faheem Mitha

@derobert I wanted to ask you about

1

A: Best practices for packaging self created software for Debian

As you mentioned, it is good practice to have debian/ in a separate branch (not necessarily repository). If other people want to package your software for another distribution or in another way as you do, it is annoying for them if they get your debian/ folder by default. In general, get-orig-so...

Having the debian files on a separate branch is getting increasingly annoying. I realised that it doesn't matter if debian/ is in the source, as long as I build tarballs that don't contain it. But I'm wondering if I missed anything.

Opinions from anyone else, also welcomed.

How delightful. Someone just downvoted my C++ template shadow question. Since I just asked about it on the C++ lounge, chances it was someone there. Friendly crowd.

strugee

20:28

@derobert yeah... that OP...

@derobert it's worth noting, too, that Plan 9 programs are extremely small.

GNU has a lot of bloat.

useful bloat, sometimes, but not always.

like, cat -b should be a wrapper.

this is why Plan 9 cat takes zero arguments.

Ulrich Dangel

@FaheemMitha switch to git, use git-pristine-tar for the orig.tar.gz, don't use a native format, provide a proper distribution release, set the correct copyright, use lintian

Faheem Mitha

@UlrichDangel I use lintian. What is wrong with mercurial?

And I'm not using a native format.

Ulrich Dangel

@FaheemMitha imo the packaging tools are better for git, but YMMV

i didnt look too closely for a while at the mercurial ones

Faheem Mitha

@UlrichDangel Maybe

But I'm not using a vcs helper for packaging, anyway.

strugee

@UlrichDangel define "native format"

Faheem Mitha

20:41

@strugee It's a debian term. Meant for debian only packages

Why?

derobert

@strugee Cat should take as many arguments as you care to throw at it, but ignore them all.

And then go back to scratching the furniture.

Ulrich Dangel

@FaheemMitha oh i think things like pristine-helper are amazing. also you should try to make sure that if you have minified fields you also have the source

Faheem Mitha

@UlrichDangel minified fields?

Ulrich Dangel

files

sorry

derobert

@UlrichDangel I think this is internal software he's packaging.

Faheem Mitha

20:44

@UlrichDangel this is my own code, btw

Ulrich Dangel

/me is currently distracted

strugee

@derobert nice. (though the point still stands)

@FaheemMitha just wondering

Faheem Mitha

21:08

@strugee Ok.

@strugee examples of Debian native packages are apt, dpkg, debhelper, debconf. Packages that don't have an upstream, and are maintained and created by Debian.

For example, unstable currently has apt as 1.0.5. but a package that is not Debian native will be followed by a dash (-).

for example libc6 is 2.19-4 is not a Debian native package

Gilles

@polym unix.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/52205 Please don't use code formatting for proper names: “U-Boot”, not u-boot. “Time out” is a verbal phrase, spelled with two words; “timeout” is not a verb, only a noun; so “it times out” is correct and “it timeouts” is not. Remove “EDIT: blah” marks, don't emphasize them further.

Ramesh

He is on a role today. :) unix.stackexchange.com/users/72471/polym?tab=reputation

Gilles

@polym unix.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/52216 “network” and “path” are English words here, not code

polym

@Gilles isn't to timeout a verb? Thought so, might be wrong :(. Ok I won't allow EDIT: bla stuff :).

@Gilles should network and path be left in quotes then to show that they are search terms?

Gilles

@Ramesh he is on a roll

polym

21:19

@Ramesh haha :D

Gilles

@polym yes

polym

@Gilles ok thanks for the info! :)

But isn't to timepout a verb?

Ramesh

@Gilles, oops moment.

Gilles

@polym no

polym

I thought I've heard "X timeouts blabla".. Maybe it's just a slang haha

Gilles

21:20

books.google.com/ngrams/…

polym

haha that is cool

Gilles

@polym only by people who dont spoke the english good

polym

@Gilles :)

Ramesh

wow, travel.stackexchange.com/questions/31311/…

polym

21:45

Ramesh what happened to cartman :(

strugee

@FaheemMitha oh, I see. makes sense.

@FaheemMitha oh, I always assumed that was the same as in Arch

in Arch, in PKGBUILDs, we have version (upstream program version)

but we also have a concept of pkgver, or package version. you bump the package version if you make improvements to the PKGBUILD without a new upstream release.

is that what it's like in Debian?

Faheem Mitha

@strugee yes, the numeral after the dash is the Debian "release".

Or package version if you prefer.

strugee

@FaheemMitha gotcha

polym

22:08

1

Q: SSH AuthorizedKeysCommand and SELinux

I'm trying to use the SSH AuthorizedKeysCommand in a CentOS 6.5 machine, but I'm encountering an SELinux error. When I switch SELinux to permissive mode - using setenforce 0, it works, but when I turn SELinux back to enforcing, the command no longer works. I get the following readout in my audi...

Should AuthorizedKeysCommand be highlighted, too, in any way?

Gilles

@polym yes, that's code

AuthorizedKeysCommand only makes sense to a computer

polym

Ok

Done

polym

22:28

phew, 100 karma for 50 edits. I live a miserable life :D

Faheem Mitha

@polym You did 50 edits? Jeez.

polym

More than 50 edits

Not every edit was approved I think :D

I did near 2 pages x 50 questions, so max 100

now I am going to make a break haha

Then I am going to answer some questions I encountered that I might help with

and then go to sweet sweet dreamland

Faheem Mitha

@polym seems like a lot of effort.

I might do a couple of edits a day, max.

polym

@FaheemMitha yeah quite the effort :)

Faheem Mitha

@polym Did you enter into a bet or something?

polym

22:37

haha no :D

@FaheemMitha I'm just a very lonely individual, I guess?

Faheem Mitha

@polym Maybe get out more? Where do you live? Are you a student?

polym

@FaheemMitha yeah student :). It's evening and I got nothing else to do, so I earn dem swet sweet internet karma.

Faheem Mitha

@polym I'm sure you can find better things to do. :-) No offense intended to SE.

polym

@FaheemMitha Haha :D

Faheem Mitha

So, where do you live?

Ramesh

22:45

@polym, first time it reported me saying I have reviewed the 20 suggested edits limit for the day. Thanks to you :D

slm

@FaheemMitha Hey I spend a lot of time here, what's your point.

@polym - thanks for the edits. Good work.

Faheem Mitha

@slm Er, what?

Gilles

@polym You shouldn't write “♦ mod” in your profile. We're pretty tolerant of what you put in the “about me” box, but confusing people into thinking you have an administrative role is generally not accepted.

polym

@Gilles oh right I forgot to remove that, it was just a joke directed at terdon :)

Aaaand it's gone

@Ramesh haha no probs :))

@slm oh you :)

Ramesh

23:12

We should be happy that @polym is doing such great work in editing for the community even at the age of 94 :P

2

polym

@Ramesh ah, get off my lawn!

youngster!

:D

Ramesh

:D

Transcript for