Wait, what?
What happened? :( I really liked that service.
465 karma · joined June 25, 2015
What happened? :( I really liked that service.
Storage is cheap nowadays and KDE applications generally are of such high quality that it's definitely worth it.
Other examples are Digikam (hands-down the best picture organizer) and Krita (which rivals Photoshop for digital artists).
There's an excellent open source project which does this and much more: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.kde.kdecon...
People want those, and value them enough to give up federation.
My personal favorite is Zulip, by the way: https://zulip.org/
Its threaded conversation model really helps with ignoring discussion about topics you're not interested in. When I get back to an IRC/Slack/whatever channel, I spend quite a while catching up. 99% of the conversation does not concern me, yet I have to read it. Zulip's threading is a great solution to this.
Mercurial was designed to be easy to extend, and it shows.
That's why I renew them a week in advance. I set up Nagios checks which alert me when a certificate is not renewed. Those were already in place before LetEncrypt since human error is just as likely as a script breaking.
Bruce Schneier recommends against using them.
> Sometimes, important things get discussed when you’re not around. Unfortunately, so do a lot of unimportant things.
> Zulip makes it easy to review the conversations you missed, so you can focus on that important project without having to catch up on how Jim’s guitar lessons are going.
Someone on HN described it very well:
Wait until the first major backwards-incompatible config format change breaks something. Puppet was one example of many.
> My solution is to package that software myself in a private repo, so that I get to decide when to upgrade.
Works fine for single applications, breaks horribly for system-wide shared libraries.
Weren't those just VLC wrappers?
Well that doesn't help at all with security.
Except for when it freezes.
There's a big difference, though - Arch Linux has no concept of partial upgrades. You have to update, or things break. Gentoo allows you to stick with old versions and has a pretty sophisticated mechanism for that ("slots"). It's also complicated, which is one of the reasons Arch Linux is easier to use.
This makes Arch Linux unsuitable for pretty much any "production" scenario. Puppet version updated to 4? Tough luck if you didn't scramble and update all of your code since version 4 has backwards-incompatible changes.
Works pretty well for desktops - if something breaks, you can usually just fix it. But it does not scale.
Gentoo, on the other hand, has an unstable and a "stable" channel and you can use it for production systems if you've got the necessary manpower to essentially build your own distro.
Easier said than done in many environments. RHEL 6, released in 2012, is still supported until 2017!
He does have a point about unmaintained packages, though. Debian probably shouldn't package things if they cannot support it over the lifetime of the release. Why would I ever want to use a two-years-old Wordpress version? I never understood why those kinds of applications are even packaged at all.
Most sysadmins deal with this by including a third party repository for applications and Elasticsearch (any many others), often by the authors themselves, which takes care of security and version updates. This eliminates most of the concerns. You get a rock-solid operating system and an up to date application on top of it. Web applications like Wordpress or Owncloud aren't usually deployed using distro packages at all.
Debian (and other distros) do a perfectly fine job updating the actual operating system.
They have an excellent testing/QA process, especially given the speed at which they're developing - this results in a very high quality.