Void Linux: Some Context for Recent Events

https://voidlinux.org/news/2020/04/some-context.html

by BlackLotus89 • 6 years ago

43 21 6 years ago

Well... That's truly unfortunate, but on a pragmatic level it really shouldn't be an issue; Void, by necessity, is no longer dependent on any one person after the last time he left. I'd only worry if it implied deeper organizational issues, which is possible but I don't see any obvious evidence.

emkemp• 6 years ago

It appears Juan RP is having some problems.

https://twitter.com/xtraemeat

storrgie• 6 years ago

a bit of a tragic read there.

ajarmst• 6 years ago

Yeah. That strikes me as more of a "hey, are you OK? Do you have someone you can talk to?" situation than an interesting flamewar.

squarefoot• 6 years ago

Apparently his gf brought their daughters away from him, and he had to spend some time fighting in court. This struck on me because I have a friend in the same situation, and he is desperate to the point we fear for him to go suicidal. Using kids as a weapon against the ex partner is just evil.

Now, unless Juan is violent to them, forcing the daughters not to contact or see him, especially if they suddenly become hostile to him, it would be a case of parental alienation, which he should fight against in court since it also hurts the kids.

jarfil• 6 years ago

Also the #StayAtHome seems to bring out the best and the word in people, and he mentions having covid-like symptoms right before all of this. That amount of stress can be bad.

Igelau3• 6 years ago

This whole thing may have ignited when one of the maintainers put an entry in the fortunes file that made fun of that: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/c3b796aca...

Smells to me like they deliberately set him off so they'd have an excuse to stage a coup. Could be wrong, but this distro looks like it's maintained by a den of vipers and I'm sure as hell not going near it.

0x8BADF00D• 6 years ago

The beauty of open source is that if you find a project's maintainers lacking in some way, you can always fork the project. When the fork becomes more popular, it can lead to changes in the original.

LEARAX• 6 years ago

Well, here the (original) maintainer is the one doing the forking, so there's a bit of a twist.

_23sd2• 6 years ago

I use Void as my main desktop OS and I wasn't aware that xtraeme was back or that he was causing problems. My gratitude to the developers working to keep the distribution stable even in difficult times.

dTal• 6 years ago

It's a shame that Void only seems to get attention when there's some sort of social drama angle. So let me plug my daily driver of the past several years:

Void is an excellent, excellent distro. It's quite similar to Arch in many ways, but its binary software repositories are much larger, and include some quite tricky customers (like FreeCAD). Its package management system is very advanced. Unlike Arch, shared libraries are tracked, so partial updates are supported. The "templates" (a BSD-ports-like system, like Arch's PKGBUILDs) are all kept in a single github repository, which means you can basically fork the entire distro, make as many changes to as many packages as you need to get a complex feature working, and - if you like - submit the entire lot back as a pull request. Distro-on-git - a powerful concept. Package building is stateless - a clean system is created in a chroot and build dependencies are automatically installed there. It's not nix, but it's highly practical.

One gets the sense that the whole system was designed with a slightly wistful eye on the BSDs. systemd is eschewed in favor of the lightweight runit. ZFS support is first class. The repositories, in addition to all the standard Linux stuff, contain lots of little BSD hints - yes, you can install pulseaudio, but you can also install sndiod. You can install sudo, but also doas. Heck, you can even run the entire system off musl, instead of glibc. The system feels like a small voice of rebellion against the tide of bloat in Linux-land. "It doesn't have to be this way, you know...", it seems to want to say.

And yet, if you want all that bloaty Linuxy stuff, it's there and it works brilliantly. I run Plasma 5 on my laptop and it's computing nirvana. I won't say it's rock-solid - rolling distros never are - but the simplicity and elegance of the system clearly yields stability dividends. And the core developers are, quite honestly, shit-hot - and friendly too, if you stop by the #voidlinux IRC channel on Freenode.

What's not to love?

yjftsjthsd-h2• 6 years ago

Unlike Arch, shared libraries are tracked, so partial updates are supported.

Even in the bad case, xbps just tells you that there are conflicts and it can't do what you want. Which is annoying when it happens as a result of official repos rebuilding, but still nice (EDIT: or rather, better than breaking your system!).

jack1243star• 6 years ago

Since you also mentioned, how does it compare to NixOS? IIRC it is also a distro-on-git(hub), with stronger guarantees on separating package dependencies?

throwaway_ptr• 6 years ago

Second, I never left void voluntarily. My relationship had a breakup and I had to be in the court for some time, fighting for my daughters... and it ended up with me being alone. [1]
ahesford: Anybody feel like a child whose parents are getting a divorce? [2]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/voidlinux/comments/g2l9ws/thoughts_...

[2] https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/commit/bbb8bc557...

Someone please should give Juan RP a hug or something.

Now, unless Juan is violent to them, forcing the daughters not to contact or see him, especially if they suddenly become hostile to him, it would be a case of parental alienation, which he should fight against in court since it also hurts the kids.

Void Linux: Some Context for Recent Events

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