puppetmaster
Joined 10 years ago
Joined 10 years ago
Wanting to solve a problem, and trying, is great, even if the problem is niche.
Regarding the packages, those are very respectable numbers... But who is maintaining them? It takes a lot of effort to maintain a repo up to date, with patches both functional and security related. This is in most distros a full time job for a group of people. For comparison pkgsrc has 19444 packages, and it takes a substantial effort to keep up to date.
Regarding 4... I am not sure about your angle there... "Running random binaries" is risky. Technically hysp is a random binary itself, from a random source. I don´t know who you are, and even in that case any certification of authority is best efforts. You can´t certify that the code you built has not been compromised... This is a tough problem, good ideas are still needed!
OTOH, maybe you could leverage the work of the pkgsrc team to increase the number of available packages, traceability, and portability! Join forces! Synergy!!!!
And of course, there is also https://sta.li/
Complaining can be justified, and smart! But I think that those who try get extra points!
I appreciate the benefit of distro-agnostic package management, but unless you rely on a portable toolchain, or distribute statically linked binaries exclusively, we fall short from the panacea of portability (many other options available, yes, but packages are needed!)
I have personally leveraged pkgin[1] for consistency. I can simply drop pkgsrc[2] in my home directory and use the same tools in *bsds, smartos, linux, macos and cheese.
[1]https://pkgin.net/ [2]https://www.pkgsrc.org/
edit: being more specific
These could be red flags for the author, I respect that. These are not universal, yet they could be good conversation starters.
Consider that if you don't hear the answer that you expect, maybe you can contribute something of great value to the company... Or receive a lesson on the complexities of a particular business.
Also, language-itis itself can be a problem. We love the shiny, and forget the old... I am not saying that punch cards and FORTRAN are the tool of the future, but maybe FORTRAN is the right tool for a specific problem...
I don't know if you have noticed... But programming languages could potentially mean very little, soon.
I am old, I've seen it all, sometimes I use containers. Are they useful? Sure! Are they "the final form"? No!
Tools are just tools, don't get obsessed about them... They only matter when used properly to solve the right problem. Obsession about tooling generates so much waste... and burnout!
And as additional food for thought... How many outages can anyone remember that were caused because of lack of generation capacity?
About powerplants in France shutting down because of cooling during the summer... I find it hard to believe this is a widespread issue, if an issue at all. Many of the existing nuclear reactors are reaching an age where massive maintenance schedules need to be executed. If the problem is extending the thermal range, that's relatively easy to fix.
Source: I used to build powerplants.
As a side note, anything security related exists in the reality of uncertainty. It is expected that sharing properly secured secrets is reasonably safe, but day after day we discover "we didn't know". Sometimes simplicity for a particular application is worth certain amount of risk.
Sometimes, you need to take the server out of its box, out of the bunker, and plug it to both the power distribution network, and of course... a LAN...
For quick reference: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesiod_(name_service) - https://jpmens.net/2012/06/28/hesiod-a-lightweight-directory...