Just some Internet guy

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I think P2P has stood the test of time. Torrents scale extremely well, any large scale video would have so many peers the server wouldn’t have to participate at all. These days most torrents easily saturate my gigabit connection no problem with just a handful of peers. Torrents tends to spread like wildfire.

    The main issue would be storage space, but I think a lot of YouTubers would be perfectly okay with spending $5-10 a month to pay for the storage costs with all the benefits you get from not being tied to YouTube’s ToS and policies. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the earnings from sponsor spots.










  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.metoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    19 days ago

    In that specific context I was still thinking about how you need to run mysql_upgrade after an update, not the regular post upgrade scripts. And Arch does keep those relatively simple. As I said, Arch won’t restart your database for you, and also won’t run mysql_upgrade because it also doesn’t preconfigure a user for itself to do that. And it also doesn’t initialize /var/lib/mysql for you either upon installation. Arch only does maintenance tasks like rebuild your font cache, create system users, reload systemd. And if those scripts fail, it just moves on, it’s your job to read the log and fix it. It doesn’t fail the package installation, it just tells you to go figure it out yourself.

    Debian distros will bounce your database and run the upgrade script for you, and if you use unattended upgrades it’ll even randomly bounce in the middle of the night because it pull a critical security update that probably don’t apply to you anyway. It’ll bail out mid dist-upgrade and leave you completely fucked, because it couldn’t restart a fucking database. It’s infuriating, I’ve even managed to get apt to be incapable of deleting a package (or reinstalling it)/because it wanted to run a pre-remove script that I had corrupted in a crash. Apt completely hosed, dpkg completely hosed, it was a pain in the ass.

    With the Arch philosophy I still need to fix my database, but at least the rest of my system gets updated perfectly and I can still use pacman to install the tools I need to fix the damn database. I have all those issues with Debian because apt tries to do way too fucking much for its own good.

    The Arch philosophy works. I can have that automated, if I asked for it and set up a hook for it.


  • Pacman just does a lot less work than apt, which keeps things simpler and more straightforward.

    Pacman is as close as it gets to just untar’ing the package to your system. It does have some install scripts but they do the bare minimum needed.

    Comparatively, Debian does a whole lot more under the hood. It’s got a whole configuration management thing that generates config files and stuff, which is all stuff that can go wrong especially if you overwrote it. Debian just assumes apt can log into your MySQL database for example, to update your tables after updating MySQL. If any of it goes wrong, the package is considered to have failed to install and you get stuck in a weird dependency hell. Pacman does nothing and assumes nothing, its only job is to put the files in the right place. If you want it to start, you start it. If you want to run post-upgrade, you got to do it yourself.

    Thus you can yank an Arch system 5 years into the future and if your configs are still valid or default, it just works. It’s technically doable with apt too but just so much more fragile. My Debian updates always fail because NGINX isn’t happy, Apache isn’t happy, MySQL isn’t happy, and that just results in apt getting real unhappy and stuck. And AFAIK there’s no easy way to gaslight it into thinking the package installed fine either.










  • I also wanted to put an emphasis on how working with virtual disks is very much the same as real ones. Same well known utilities to copy partitions work perfectly fine. Same cgdisk/parted and dd dance as you otherwise would.

    Technically if you install the arch-install-scripts package on your host, you can even install ArchLinux into a VM exactly as if you were in archiso with the comfort of your desktop environment and browser. Straight up pacstrap it directly into the virtual disk.

    Even crazier is, NBD (Network Block Device) is generic so it’s not even limited to disk images. You can forward a whole ass drive from another computer over WiFi and do what you need on it, even pass it to a VM boot it up.

    With enough fuckery you could even wrap the partition in a fake partition table and boot the VM off the actual partition and make it bootable by both the host and the VM at the same time.