You need to encode the metadata in a standard way, encode new data that shows up in a standard way, and various people can add more metadata to files: think like Posix ACLs or the immutable flag or whatever.
Nix actually invented a fork of tar specifically for this called “normalized archive” or “Nix Archive” or nar. Guix uses this too:
https://releases.nixos.org/nix/nix-2.22.0/manual/protocols/nix-archive.html
“here is a checksum of my /usr/lib folder, if yours differs from mine I can’t provide installation support”
Hey, Guix user here, I…if you want we… We could recommend to each other…
Shepherd my love!
I’ve used SystemD for years and the pure joy writing system initialization units in Scheme gives me can’t be overstated.
Seriously, a lot of times I feel like I stick with Guix’s many problems just for shepherd.
No, I’m pretty sure “try volunteering yourself” is a perfectly reasonable response to “why has nobody volunteered to fix this?”
As a guix user with custom package permutations, I feel your pain.
The problem is that the road between creating a piece of software that does something well, and then creating simplification layers on top of it is typically much longer than just “edit a config file” and “here’s a readme”.
You need extra documentation, config gating and workflow, warnings, UI/UX work etc.
I know there are Linux elitists but kind of expecting that much extra work for what is still at it’s core mostly volunteer software seems like it’s own form of elitism.
From my experience it’s quite the opposite, cause when something breaks in guix/nix/bazzite you basically need to know how the entire subsystem works to troubleshoot it.
You can’t just copy paste some nonsense from superuser to fix it.
There’s been a lot more evangelism about emacs lately.
Also the fact emacs has doom and spacemacs to ease new users in while vim drops you into : and tells you to swim means that it’s easier for emacs to get new users.
Weirdly enough because of the way mergerfs does writes across multiple drives, the main issue that FUSE filesystems face performance wise (namely writing a bunch of small files and their metadata) actually gets pretty well mitigated.
Who needs RAID when you have mergerfs
If you’re using flatpak and Firefox you have to un-sandbox the font files from both flatpak and firefox’s content sandbox
Most of the reason to build your own packages is a form of runtime assurance - to know what your computer is running is 100% what you intend.
At least as a guix user that’s what I tell myself.
Hell yea +1 for shepherd.
Declarativity on steroids.
I mean DMA (direct memory access) devices are only like 170 bucks now:
https://www.dma-cheats.com/dma-cards
These are almost impossible to do anything about even client-side because they operate on a hardware level.
In general state-reading hacks (like invisible walls and Gameworld state information hacks) are almost impossible to do anything about, to the point where when companies are able to find a way to defeat one of these things it’s huge news.
Guix user pains. The packages download at that speed.
It’s a tossup whether downloading Librewolf or building it will take longer
That’s ironic considering the magic word is basically shouting “balls”
I use guix cause having an entire OS centered around Scheme is cool and based.
Wearing out the parentheses keys on my keyboard
A real flatpak cake would come wrapped in the oven used to bake it.