Haiku package management

https://www.markround.com/blog/2023/02/13/haiku-package-management/

by julicen • 3 years ago

217 52 3 years ago

mark_round3• 3 years ago

Author of the article here. Thanks for posting this! There's also a really interesting thread on lobste.rs [1] where a Haiku developer talks more about some of their less user-visible innovations, compares the Linux development model to Haiku, and gives some background on the drama[2] caused by the adoption of their package management system.

Well worth a read and fascinating (to me, anyway!) to see new ideas and approaches from the Alt-OS scene.

[1]=https://lobste.rs/s/j9decl/haiku_package_management

[2]=https://lobste.rs/s/j9decl/haiku_package_management#c_owqi3t

sleepycatgirl• 3 years ago

That was good article :D

Definitely going to look into Haiku more myself :)

mark_round3• 3 years ago

I highly recommend it! Even if you haven't had the experience or attachment to BeOS it's a refreshing and fun take on a desktop system. It just "clicks" with me in a way that Linux/Windows/Mac never did. It's truly impressive that they've been going for over 20 years now (I still remember the first screenshot of app_server drawing a window in the early 2000s) and have accomplished so much from scratch. Can't wait to see where the project will go next!

haunter• 3 years ago

Honestly that’s incredible. Is there anything close to it in the Linux world? Or I guess, I’m not an expert, that’s what NixOS is trying to solve?

Just because they never got wide adoption doesn’t mean they were wrong

This is actually something that I was thinking about recently, applies to a lot of topics not just OSes

iveqy2• 3 years ago

See my comment about apkovl

guipsp• 3 years ago

Is there anything close to it in the Linux world?

Check out (as you mentioned) NixOS or Fedora Silverblue

tmtvl• 3 years ago

And Guix and OpenSUSE MicroOS. There may be others, but those are the ones that immediately come to mind.

seized• 3 years ago

Also Fedora Kinoite, the KDE flavor of Silverblue.

alxmng• 3 years ago

You’re right. That’s what NixOS is, a Linux distro where all software is managed by Nix, so the users environment is fully compartmentalized, declarative, and reproducible.

MuffinFlavored• 3 years ago

so the users environment is fully compartmentalized, declarative, and reproducible.

I have a question about this, please forgive my ignorance. I see this statement repeated a lot about NixOS and I've kind of had some "success" in the comments section being "critical" / "asking hard questions" about NixOS.

If I have a build script that pulls + compiles + validates with hashes/checksums say, Linux kernel, some userspace tools, init system, etc. for a boring ol' distribution like Alpine or Debian, why isn't that classified as "reproducible" the same way NixOS is?

Gordonjcp• 3 years ago

It's kind of what snap is trying to be, but it's not there yet.

pxc4• 3 years ago

Honestly that’s incredible. Is there anything close to it in the Linux world?

Yeah, this is similar in spirit to what Flatpak and Snap do. The latter even uses SquashFS images it mounts for every package.

I have a feeling, though, that this is more similar to Distri¹, where the package manager is a bit more traditional. That is to say, packages are fine-grained (not packaging large runtimes into single chunks, like Flatpak and Snap) and there's not as much special tooling as Flatpak has for redirecting inputs and outputs, sandboxing, etc.

Distri also eliminates all hooks and triggers from packages, leading to super fast installs, which is pretty cool.

Or I guess, I’m not an expert, that’s what NixOS is trying to solve?

From the article, three key features highlighted are:

  >  - Immutable system directories
  >  - Rollback to previous states
  >  - User-managed packages separated from system packages

And, going by those criteria: yes. NixOS and GuixSD are two Linux-based operating systems which meet all three criteria today. One key difference is that Nix and Guix don't require namespacing at the filesystem, since they install everything to those wacky store prefixes with the leading hashes. Put another way: /boot/system on Haiku is a mountpoint, but /run/booted-system on NixOS is just a symlink, even though both serve the same function².

But spiritually I'd say the basic idea (avoid dependency hell through lightweight package isolation) is similar and so are the results, at least in terms of capabilities.

PS: If you're interested in another example, RedoxOS' package manager also has a very similar design to Haiku's and Distri's, IIRC.

—

1: https://distr1.org/

2: Because NixOS allows you to switch to a new system without booting it (i.e., it lets you upgrade without rebooting), it actually has two symlinks here: booted-system and current-system. The current-system symlink rotates as soon as you switch configurations, but booted-system gets set only on a new boot.

outworlder• 3 years ago

Yeah, although Haiku seems to solve this problem more elegantly than Nix(the package manager) does(aka without a billion links). It is still great and I use it across many machines, including on OSX.

Another thing BeOS did well (and it's still ahead) was the filesystem. The mail program was implemented directly in the filesystem: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/the-b...

At one point in history, there was a chance that BeOS would be adopted as the Mac OS. I wonder how that fork in the road would look like.

pxc4• 3 years ago

Haiku seems to solve this problem more elegantly than Nix(the package manager) does(aka without a billion links). It is still great and I use it across many machines, including on OSX.

If Nix's solution were more elegant in this sense, you wouldn't be able to use it on macOS because macOS lacks the required sandboxing features.

iveqy2• 3 years ago

Looks a lot like apkovl https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup for Alpine linux. Not the most easy to grasp documentation but it's basically a package (apk, similar do rpm or deb) that each has its own overlayfs.

mouse_• 3 years ago

I swear, pet project operating systems like Haiku and SerenityOS are the only things that still fill me with hope and keep me going these days. I could go on for hours writing love letters to Haiku.

09284421980• 3 years ago

the hacker me

ofalkaed3• 3 years ago

Been watching Haiku for around a decade now, install it every year or so to give it a go and it is getting very close to being my primary OS. Great project with a good community, devs are very helpful.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 3 years ago

Same for me. It inches closer every release.

hbbio• 3 years ago

Another great feature of Haiku!

I love playing from time to time with it. If there would be ARM64 support (I wish I could find time to contribute...), combined with the progress of Asahi Linux, it would be fun (and a pun to history) to run Haiku on Apple M1s!

cmrdporcupine• 3 years ago

Is the package system there something that Haiku invented, or was BeOS like this as well? I had a BeOS install at one point in the 90s, but don't remember how that worked.

mark_round3• 3 years ago

It's a Haiku thing. Added around 2018 if I recall correctly - see the linked lobste.rs thread in another of my comments where a Haiku developer gives some (really interesting) background on the development and effects on the community.

dmacvicar3• 3 years ago

Something few people know about: Haiku adopted openSUSE libsolv, built for zypper, to solve dependencies even before Fedora.

libsolv, created by Michael Schoeder at SUSE, has two innovations:

- a memory optimized format to represent packages and its dependencies, using hashed string pools - a SAT solver able to operate directly in this representation, battle tested in this particular scenario of complex upgrades, including hundred of testcases.

Haiku uses mainly the solver only, as far as I saw in the source.

darksaints• 3 years ago

Do you know anything more about the solver? The GitHub page doesn’t really talk algorithms or anything. Does it use DPLL under the covers?

dmacvicar3• 3 years ago

You can start here:

https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv/blob/347200107f0f17a3697...

bravetraveler• 3 years ago

Keep in mind that 'even before Fedora' was ~8 years ago

Not sure what my point is, I was just confused - I know SUSE/Fedora people are close

faefox• 3 years ago

I'm genuinely so grateful that Haiku exists. The fact that a band of enthusiasts has managed to keep the spirit of BeOS alive after all these years is really inspiring. To me it's an echo of what felt like a more hopeful era in computing, when the internet still felt like a magical place.

user3939382• 3 years ago

I remember installing BeOS as a bare metal dual boot on my box circa 2001-2. My impression was: wow, this OS is fast, fun, and somehow endearing. I’ve not since had that experience with another OS.

I’m also super excited to see Haiku mature. Especially once it passes that breakaway threshold where it’s not primarily being run as a VM and the third-party ecosystem starts getting traction.

supriyo-biswas• 3 years ago

Interestingly, some niche Linux distributions, such as Puppy Linux and Porteus mount packages which are SquashFS filesystems at runtime, implementing exactly this paradigm long before Nix and the likes were around.

secure• 3 years ago

My Linux research distribution “distri” works the same way :)

(I learnt about Haiku’s similar approach after building distri.)

https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-08-17-introducing-d...

https://distr1.org/

pxc4• 3 years ago

I'm a big fan of distri! Really enjoyed your blog posts on its design and development. Hopefully I didn't misremember too much about it in these comments. :)

threemux• 3 years ago

This reminds me of TinyCore Linux, which distributes packages as squashfs archives and dynamically mounts them at runtime with symlinks to the system directories. Pretty neat.

akshayjaggi• 3 years ago

Haiku was my first experience writing code for a real world software organisation, as part of Google Summer of Code.

Glad to see it still thriving and making the news every once in a while.

ofalkaed3• 3 years ago

Spent some time digging through the website today figuring out where Haiku stands. Seems they still have not sorted out the issues with non-native file systems, it is getting better but still buggy and some (most?) are read only. This is the number one issue that is keeping me from adopting Haiku as my primary system, It looks like I can now access all of my external drives with Haiku but digging through the site has not left me confident enough to let Haiku have at my drives.

Other than that it seems solid as long as your hardware is well supported. Think I will commit my laptop to it this weekend and see how long it lasts.

waddlesplash2• 3 years ago

(Haiku developer here.)

I would trust the NTFS driver pretty implicitly at this point both for read/write; it's based on NTFS-3G, and following the rewrite I did of the Haiku-specific parts of it in late 2021, appears to be very solid in testing.

The EXT2/3/4 driver is also very good, but there may be some issues remaining there. However I haven't heard reports of it destroying data.

The FAT driver, on the other hand, has some cases where it has been known to corrupt directories. It could probably use a rewrite; most of its code dates to the 1990s...

Those are the "big 3" of other filesystems, anyway. I don't think there's a status page for all of them.

ofalkaed3• 3 years ago

Thanks for the heads up. The only current issue with ext4 that I found was https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/16392 which makes me a little nervous and I don't think I will be plugging in my primary backup drive just yet but at least it can now deal with journaling on ext4, progress. For now I can deal without that but this is the thing that has historically caused me to take Haiku off the computer.

ZFS and Btrfs both are very good these days?

Can linux mount the Haiku version of BFS? Seem to recall that this was an issue the first few times I tried Haiku and it was buggy and unreliable but don't quite remember or recall trying it since. Searches are not pulling up anything useful. If not is this something Haiku is planing to work on or are you just going to let linux take care of that when ever they get around too it?

Haiku package management

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