Hacker News Reader

Comment by pritambaral | Hacker News Reader

> ... but still only supports one niche operating system.

1. Linux is not a niche in the target market for this project.

2. The project is written in Common Lisp with hard dependencies on SBCL-provided libraries[1], so there's reason to suspect it should work on other OSes supported by SBCL.

3. Sure, the presence of Makefile and sb-posix imply it requires a POSIX compliant OS, but Linux is not the only one that fits the bill.

4. The included Linux-only binary 'oras' is clearly a vendored artifact, not part of this project, and clearly an OCI client. A simple search shows it is indeed cross-platform[2].

Perhaps you should try what almost every Linux user has had to do when encountering software actually built for only one "niche" operating system that they want to use on their OS: look.

1. https://github.com/ocicl/ocicl/blob/170aff0/ocicl.asd#L34

2. https://github.com/oras-project/oras/releases

View on HN

> look.

I did look - at the README of the linked site, which clearly states:

> ocicl (...) only works on Linux

I don't see a reason why the author(s) of ocicle should lie to me. (If they do: even worse.)

> Linux is not a niche in the target market for this project.

[citation needed]

> I did look - at the README of the linked site

That's looking for the wrong thing. Us Linux users see things like that all the time: proprietary software has a download page that only lists Windows (and sometimes macOS) but never Linux.

But we don't stop there. We don't look for a reason to abandon hope (or worse, complain idly). We look for a way to run that software on Linux. And usually, it is a lot harder than this case.

>> ocicl (...) only works on Linux

> I don't see a reason why the author(s) of ocicle should lie to me.

Is it not obvious? They aren't lying. They're being clear. As they go on to say, in the very same sentence: ", but adapting to other systems and platforms should not be difficult."

If you'd looked for a way to run it on your niche operating system, like me, you'd have found an easy way. And, maybe, you could have even contributed the solution to the project, as it says two sentences after where you stopped reading and decided to idly complain in a thread on an unrelated forum.

> They aren't lying. They're being clear.

Just two posts above this one, you claimed that downloading a different ocas binary would probably work. So ocicl does not only work on Linux, right?

I had some faith in you, that you weren't intentionally being difficult, that you just needed some help in finding a way. But now that I see you trying to put words in my mouth and foolishly arguing irrelevant pedantry, I doubt it.

I get that you probably just want to win an argument, for the sake of winning an argument, and most likely you're not actually interested in getting some software to run on your niche operating system.

But, just for the far fleeting chance that you are actually interested in doing the right thing:

1. I did not claim that the "oras" binary was the only incompatibility. I guessed your quick judgement was based on that binary being vendored for one platform only and showed that it does exist for other platforms. The latter clearly does not imply the former.

2. Ocicl developers claiming it "only works on Linux" is not a promise they make to you. You cannot hold them at gotcha-gunpoint just in case the software happens to run on a non-Linux OS. They are not interested in playing a game of gotchas with you.

They _are_ being clear: they have only tested it to work on Linux. It is you that misreads it, probably because, I'm guessing, you aren't familiar with the language of OSS READMEs

> They _are_ being clear: they have only tested it to work on Linux. It is you that misreads it, probably because, I'm guessing, you aren't familiar with the language of OSS READMEs

That might well be the case here. No, I don't try to win arguments on the internet. :-) Thank you.

> No, I don't try to win arguments on the internet.

this thread is evidence to the contrary.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com