/dev/chat - 2015-12-01

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12:01 AM

@terdon - it's not too chatty?

@mikeserv No, I was needlessly aggressive and wanted to apologize. 'S what I get when I post before finishing my first coffee of the day.

its cool.

dont sweat it.

By the way @mikeserv could you add an explanation to your printf "${var+%s\n}" answer? That\s really cool and I have no clue how it works.

drink coffee.

oh.

var=; echo "${var+is set}"; unset var; echo "${var+nothing here}".

you can inject stuff like that anywhere. so printf %.0s string prints nothing, and printf "%${var+.0}s" string" prints string only when $var is not set.

@mikeserv Yeah, I saw, but what does ${var+foo} do?

12:05 AM

its a self-test

${param+word}

substitutes in word when param is set.

${param:+word} does it when $param is set and not null.

so it doesn't expand to the value of $param only to whatever you want so long as $param is set.

the opposite goes for :-

Nice!

Never knew that. Since you're the one telling me, can I assume it is POSIX shell syntax?

actually, the coolest thing about it is: var=something; printf ${var+"%s\n" "$@"}

yes.

the quotes can be on the inside.

and gen multiple fields, or be completely null.

Ah! Hang on, I had seen that but I'm an idiot. I'd only considered it for setting variables and don't use it anyway. At least I'd seen it in that context though.

right. its not very useful like that... well, i take that back - it can be,

but, its more fun like that^

Absolutely. Nice trick.

Right, I'm off to bed.

12:10 AM

night night

Night

@RobertL please ping me if you'd like to discuss your meta answer and my rude comment to it. I'd like to explain where I was coming from. I'll be back in a few hours.

Terdon being rude? Now I'm going to go read meta!

@Fabby If you find the link, post it.

0

A: Are distribution-choice questions on topic here?

This happens frequently. I write an answer and before I can post it the answer is closed as "opinion based". I propose that there are fact-based answers to this question which will help the questioner make an educated decision. For example, the following answer contains many facts and referenc...

I'm disappointed to not find any terdon rudeness. Damn.

12:22 AM

Me too! @terdon: that's a light hammer! Don't worry about it...

It's a balanced comment!

Does anyone know how to dual boot Linux With Win 10?

Because the stupid sucure boot isn't booting Linux.

12:52 AM

@MathCubes You again?

:P ;-)

Good night all

sudo shutdown

4 hours later…

4:26 AM

Anyone Interested in "Agriculture Science & Agronomy" ?

3

Agricultural Science and Agronomy

Proposed Q&A site for professionals, researchers, students and others interested in Agricultural Science and Agronomy

Currently in definition.

Visit:

Propose Example questions.

@Seth chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/25807311#25807311 ?

4 hours later…

8:13 AM

@Pandya Is this an area you work in?

8:37 AM

@FaheemMitha you mean my profession/business-work?

No. I am not working in this area but just proposed a site because I think Agriculture is an important field.

8:57 AM

@Pandya Ah, ok.

@Pandya Yes, I meant your professional work.

3 hours later…

12:11 PM

@FaheemMitha I deleted it :)

Here you go:

> Sorry, but i) meta is not the place for technical answers, they belong on the main site. I know the question was closed but nevertheless. ii) Your answer before my edit was not fact, but pure opinion. Who decided Ubuntu Server is "the easiest of the three" to install? "I don't believe CentOS has the testing and release effort of Debian"? Doesn't get much more opinion based than that. Oh, and Ubuntu Server is not only not "known for it's complete desktop environment", it actually doesn't even have one by default. This sort of thing is precisely why we try to avoid this type of question. – …

@Fabby here, to feed your curiosity. ^^

12:29 PM

@terdon Still not that rude. :-(

@terdon I still don't find it aggressive. Sharp and to the point, yes - rude and/or aggressive, no.

I was imagining Linus Torvalds levels of rudeness. 4 letter word speckled tirades.

But then, @terdon is one of the most polite people you can find online...

Well, the OP did and that was enough since I had no intention to antagonize him.

@terdon I think you need to find your inner Linus Torvalds. :-)

12:30 PM

But hey, thanks :)

@FaheemMitha Oh, I am in touch with him, don't worry. I try not to let him out and play on a site where I'm a moderator. Bad show, what.

@FaheemMitha Oh dear $DEITY, please no. We do not need more people who think their programming skills entitle them to treat others like shit.

@terdon Stiff upper lip and all that.

Mustn't let the side down. Play cricket. Etc. etc.

@JennyD Kidding.

@JennyD If you like, I can start making comments about how you obviously must know less than I do, despite your years of sysadmin experience, because you are a woman and, therefore, ignorant of computers by definition. ;P

I mean, I channel the bofh sometimes. Well, often. Well, maybe most of the time. Well...
But I don't do it against innocent third parties.

@JennyD And users are never innocent, right?

12:32 PM

@terdon If you can come up with a version of that, that I haven't heard already, I'd actually find it interesting

I'm sure I couldn't, sadly.

Still, there must have been some funny moments where some idiot tries to teach his grandmother how to suck eggs.

@terdon Actually one of the reasons that the ServerFault chat room is now mostly empty is that we all realized that the tone of the chat room was such that new people weren't comfortable there - but we who were didn't want to change. So we moved elsewhere, and kept up the jargon and in-jokes where it doesn't bother anyone

Yeah, I know. I followed some of that drama from a distance.

Meh, you shouldn't care about the little snowflake feelings of each user you come across with. Above all: be honest

@terdon I do have a really funny story about that, from back in the day when I was email sysadmin at an ISP. This was at the point where I'd been there long enough to rebuild the entire system; there was nobody around who knew it better than me. And one day a customer got directed to me from 2nd line support - this was rare, because the support people were good, but he'd insisted enough that they let him speak to the actual sysadmin. And I answered my phone. The conversation went like this:

12:37 PM

@Braiam I think you'd make a really good BOFH.

"Hello, sysadmin Jenny speaking"
"I want to talk to the sysadmin, not to support!"
"Yes, I'm the sysadmin for the mail servers."
"No, I mean, the person who actually works with them!"
"Yes, that's me."
"No, I mean the technical person, not support or customer service!"
"Yes, that's me."
"NO! I need to talk to the TECH PEOPLE!"
After a while I gave up, muted my phone and called around the office "There's a guy here who doesn't believe I'm actually working with the mail system. Can one of you guys (all of whom were men) please talk to him?"

3

@JennyD Institutionalized sexism is a wonderful thing.

My colleague took over the call, and after that I only heard his side, which went:
"I don't know that."
"Sorry, I have no idea."
"Sorry, that's not something I work with."
"No, sorry, no idea."
*incoherent yelling*
"Well, you were on the phone with the right person a while back, but you didn't want to talk to her, and now I don't think she wants to talk with you!"
The customer hung up.

12

lol :)

Shibboleet!

Our boss backed us all the way when the client called to complain later.

12:39 PM

Serves him right.

@FaheemMitha nah, actually that's on the "be nice" policy of the site

This is where folks have repeatedly gotten confused by Stack Overflow's "be nice" rule, @Brian: being nice does not mean always giving someone what they want. Down-voting, closing, deleting bad posts makes the site better for everyone, but leaving rude comments or unhelpful answers makes it worse - again, for everyone. So the trick is to do the former without becoming frustrated enough to engage in the latter. — Shog9 ♦ Apr 28 '14 at 15:36

but leaving rude comments or unhelpful answers makes it worse

Which goes double for a mod, sadly.

I do not find yours rude or unhelpful: you said what is wrong, why and how it would be fine

@terdon Well, your behavior is exemplary. Though one can see the stress lines, sometimes.

I know, I just could have phrased it a bit more gently. Especially since I left the comment and removed the offending content.

@FaheemMitha Thanks :)

1:04 PM

@terdon Ah! Looking at it from the outside: @RobertL had a bit of a point ;-)

Yup.

don't let yourself be tempted into religious answers: stay your nice and warm and funny self...

(sometimes it's difficult: I had the same kind of thing happen to me a while ago with an OP taking up more of my time then I wished myself)

>:-)

Cough... Help vampire Cough...

:)

1:28 PM

@terdon Actually, the current state of that answer no longer makes sense since (it appears) you deleted the content it was referencing. I refer to:

-1

A: Are distribution-choice questions on topic here?

This happens frequently. I write an answer and before I can post it the question is closed as "opinion based". I propose that there are fact-based answers to this question which will help the questioner make an educated decision. For example, the following answer contains many facts and refere...

But. hey presto, there is no following answer! Now you see it, now you don't...

If it's referring to an answer somewhere else (I haven't followed it this closely) it should link to that.

@FaheemMitha Thanks, fixed.

hello, I have a problem and did not find a thread in the forum that solved it, moreover it seems to need interactive process to solve. When I try to login to Linux Mint it loops on the login screen. more precisely it briefly goes to console mode and after 2 seconds back to the graphical login screen

I can switch to console with ctrl alt F1 mode and do stuff, but I try several things and nothing fixed it

unix.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic should probably have a site-specific section "What type of questions to avoid asking", but currently doesn't. Lots of sites, do, though. I think it would be useful.

that's a very common problem with a very specific troubleshooting path

depending your graphics card

the weird things is that it appeared after I did some change with the sound system

to try to get the microphone working

where can I find this troobleshooting path ?

1:42 PM

have you tried searching "login loop <graphics card> mint"?

just solved it by reinstalling cinnamon... weird that updating the distro did not work but this did\thanks anyway, bye !

2:20 PM

@cas Hah, you were there at the beginning. Tell us, who named APT APT? :-)

Was it Andrew?

And the APT WP page says Brian White "commissioned" APT. Did it really go down like that?

I need a supersuer to read english ; unix.stackexchange.com/a/246623/79818 ... (I know less than half of you half as ... )

I guess Brian left the project long ago. I've never seen any activity from him.

"This project was commissioned by Brian White, the Debian Release Manager at the time." from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Packaging_Tool#History

4 hours later…

6:36 PM

@FaheemMitha - hah, i'd completely forgotten that. yeah, looks like it was Andrew. really can't remember if Brian commissioned it or not. I do remember not liking "deity" as a name.

@cas Yes, apparently is was too "religious". So you can't remember much of the history of the time?

nope. but I'm kind of surprised i didn't make the tortured effort to get an acronym of SATAN at the time.

@cas acronym of SATAN? Like TASAN?

Maybe ANTAS.

no, satan as a replacement for deity.

Do you remember who was involved in the early days, besides Jason Gunthorpe?

I suppose one could try and find the commit history and dig through it.

@cas Yes, I got that part.

What does "commissioning" mean, anyway? "Ho slaves, go forth and develop a package manager for Debian"?

6:52 PM

it was probably more like yet another variation of what was a common complaint at the time - "dselect's user interface sucks with this many packages, we need a replacement". and then actually doing the work required to organise it.

as it turned out, apt never became a replacement for dselect. it became a command-line tool and a dselect method (alongside file, http, ftp, etc methods). and then later people wrote aptitude and synaptic and other front-ends.

7:07 PM

@cas But dselect didn't work as well as apt, right? Did it do automatic dependency resolution? I've never used it. The first release of Debian I used, potato, was also the first release in which aptappeared. And more or less completely took over, as I recall.

Hi folks :)

I need a linux whizkid for my problem

@Ell hi

Or maybe it's easy :P

I want to "run bash on a tty via usb"

and by that what I mean is, I have an RPi zero and a pc and I want to run a terminal emulator on my PC to control a bash session on my Pi

So my first step to that is to "run a tty" on my local machine and try to "connect" to i

7:26 PM

@faheem, yes it did. it deferred a lot of decisions to the operator, but it still resolved dependencies. think of it as automated dep resolution with manual override. it was this that was becoming a chore as debian got tens of thousands of packages. in its day, though, dselect was brilliant - years ahead of anything the other distros had.

@cas I see. But the dependency handling was presumably not as automated as apt.

i kept on using it for years after apt was released (but with apt as the dselect method - that was a great combination). then it became too tedious to wade through tens of thousands of packages, individually selecting which packages would get installed. servers were easy, just base minimal system plus the handful of packages needed for the server's task. desktops tended to have a lot more installed.

it used different selection algorithm, but it had access to all the same Depends: Suggests: Recommends: and Conflicts: headers as apt did. apt built on what came before, it wasn't a complete revolution.

apt took over because it made it easy to install a package or a bunch of packages WITHOUT having to run dselect but still having the automated dependency resolution that dselect gave you. before apt, you either had to manually download and install with dpkg, or run dselect, select packages (including new and updated packages) and then run an upgrade.

apt made it easy to install packages without doing a full upgrade.

btw, manually downloading and installing with dpkg meant doing that for all the dependencies too.

which is why it was common practice then to download a bunch of packages into a directory and then run dpkg -iGROEB dirname/

apt made doing stuff like that so much easier.

So with dselectyou couldn't just specify a list of packages to install? I guess not...

1 hour later…

8:42 PM

Under Arch when I tried to start "gnome-terminal" under xterm it outputs this "te application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
Error constructing proxy for org.gnome.Terminal:/org/gnome/Terminal/Factory0: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.gnome.Terminal: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ChildExited: Process org.gnome.Terminal exited with status 8"f

if you have a question, then ask a question. that's what the site is for.

Any ideas

I am new to Ardh

I thought it would of been something simple

chat is not a substitute for the site.

yea

9:01 PM

I figure it out

It was something simple but I would consider it a bug

2 hours later…

11:17 PM

I seem to be running into this bug, or a close relative. I have usbmount. I don't understand the issue, except that it seems usbmount may be buggy.

bugs.debian.org/774149

Hmm. Looks like the problem might be with systemd.

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