Comment Proposed New Story Section: (Score 1) 114
"Raw Press Releases."
C'mon, guys, this is copy-pasted marketing fluff. Better is expected of you.
C'mon, guys, this is copy-pasted marketing fluff. Better is expected of you.
He's implying that developers will specify a complete environment where every DLL available to the application within the environment is exactly what the developer used. There is no DLL hell because you run what the developer ran, and it doesn't matter if you have seventeen different incompatible versions of (to pick windows example everyone's familiar with) mfc42.dll, because things inside the container won't know that you have those dlls.
In that case, why bother with dynamic linking at all? Why not statically link everything? The effect is essentially the same -- you get exactly what the developer had. You also get no shared code pages -- even if you're using exactly the same library as someone else -- and bloated memory and disk usage since you have your own private copy of everything. Disk may be "cheap," but it's still surprisingly easy to fill up a 16GB eMMC device.
"You can update transactionally!!" Great. What does that mean? Is it like git add newapp; git commit -a? If so, how do I back out a program I installed three installations ago?
Transactional updates have lots of useful properties: if they are done well, you can know EXACTLY what's running on a particular system, [
... ]
dpkg -l
You can roll updates back, [
... ]
dpkg -i <previous_version>
...lets you choose exactly the capabilities you want for yourself, rather than having someone else force you to use a particular tool.
#include <cheap_shots/systemd.h>
Because there is a single repository of frameworks and packages, and each of them has a digital fingerprint that cannot be faked, two people on opposite ends of the world can compare their systems and know that they are running exactly the same versions of the system and apps.
debsums
Developers of snappy apps get much more freedom to bundle the exact versions of libraries that they want to use with their apps.
...Did this guy just say he brought DLL Hell to Linux? Help me to understand how he didn't just say that.
I bet the average system on the cloud ends up with about three packages installed, total! Try this sort of output:
$ snappy info
release: ubuntu-core/devel
frameworks: docker, panamax
apps: owncloudThat's much easier to manage and reason about at scale.
No, it isn't!! What the hell is OwnCloud pulling in? What's it using as an HTTP server? As an SSL/TLS stack? Is it the one with the Heartbleed bug, the POODLE bug, or some new bug kluged in by the app vendor to add some pet feature that was rejected from upstream because it was plainly stupid?
Honestly, I'm really not getting this. It just sounds like they created a pile of tools that lets "cloud" administrators be supremely lazy. What am I missing here?
I worked for NTG/3DO for just under five years, so I know (knew) the machine inside and out. It will be interesting to go through this code and see what kind of tradeoffs were made.
Some comments on the README:
My friends at 3DO were begging for DOOM to be on their platform and with christmas 1995 coming soon (I took this job in August of 1995, with a mid October golden master date), I literally lived in my office, only taking breaks to take a nap and got this port completed.
*snerk* I could have told you at the time that a ten-week dev cycle was crazy talk.
Shortcuts made...
3DO's operating system was designed around running an app and purging, there was numerous bugs caused by memory leaks. So when I wanted to load the Logicware and id software logos on startup, the 3DO leaked the memory so to solve that, I created two apps, one to draw the 3do logo and the other to show the logicware logo. After they executed, they were purged from memory and the main game could run without loss of memory.
An interesting and valid approach (3DO's OS had full memory tracking). I'd be interested to know which of the 3DO libs was leaking memory on you.
The verticle walls were drawn with strips using the cell engine. However, the cell engine can't handle 3D perspective so the floors and ceilings were drawn with software rendering. I simply ran out of time to translate the code to use the cell engine because the implementation I had caused texture tearing.
Were the floor/ceiling textures not power-of-two dimensions on each side? As I recall, you only got texture cracking when the dimensions were not power-of-two.
You could have decomposed the floor/ceiling textures into strips as well, but ultimately the lack of perspective correction meant you were going to have to do some heavy lifting somewhere.
I had to write my own string.h ANSI C library because the one 3DO supplied with their compiler had bugs! string.h??? How can you screw that up!?!?! They did! I spent a day writing all of the functions I needed in ARM 6 assembly.
Ah, yes, the Norcroft compiler (or, as I always called it, Norcruft). It was a piece of shit. It was also the only thing available that would run on the Mac. It was never anything but a C compiler, but kept throwing unblockable warnings about constructs that C++ would have problems with (such as implicit cast from void*). There was no MacOS port of GCC, and there were no usable ARM backends for GCC available at the time, anyway. (Bear in mind, this was before the Web existed in any familiar form, and you had to go trawling through USENET for clues -- not even AltaVista existed yet).
I hope that everyone who looks at this code, learns something from it, and I'd be happy to answer questions about the hell I went through to make this game. I only wished I had more time to actually polish this back in 1995 so instead of being the worst port of DOOM, it would have been the best one.
I'm sure many memories will come flooding back.
Well... All told, I think that went rather well.
I wanted to chime in and thank everyone for participating in what was clearly an insane exercise in trying to cut through the acrimony and vitriol and get some actual information on what systemd is and what it's trying to do. You can't always grok what complex things are about just from the docs. That's why I wanted actual first-hand experiences from people who could point to actual gems they'd found.
To respond to some recurring remarks throughout the comments:
In the best tradition of USENET, I thought I'd summarize the highlights of what I got out of the whole thing. Most of the good posts have already been modded up, but the ones that especially stood out for me were these:
Thanks again to everyone who chimed in. You've given me a lot to read up on...
Think back to the epic holy wars of the past. Emacs vs. Vi. Big vs. Little Endian. Motorola vs. Intel. Amiga vs. Atari ST. ASCII vs. EDBIC.
vi*. Little-endian. Motorola. Amiga. ASCII**. Obviously.
(* with great respect to those who are able to use EMACS well.)
(** Seriously, who not using punched cards ever actually liked EBCDIC?)
Bonus points are awarded for:
We will assume out of the gate that systemd boots your system faster than ${SOMETHING_ELSE}, so no points for bringing that up.
You know that you don't have to just add useless and uninteresting words to something that already had substance, right? At least borrow some quotes from Socrates' Dialogues to spice things up: There is admirable truth in that. That is not to be denied. That appears to be true. All this seems to flow necessarily out of our previous admissions. I think that what you say is entirely true. That, replied Cebes, is quite my notion. To that we are quite agreed. By all means. I entirely agree and go along with you in that. I quite understand you. I shall still say that you are the Daedalus who sets arguments in motion; not I, certainly, but you make them move or go round, for they would never have stirred, as far as I am concerned. If you're going to say _nothing_, at least be interesting about it, post anonymously, or risk looking more clueless / foolish. This is why the moderation system is in place, and mods typically don't listen to inanities like "Well said" when deciding on what to spend their points.
1. I'm too busy to sit around thinking up additional words to throw in so I can score "mod" points
2. The people I like on Slashdot are too busy to read a bunch of additional words I only threw in so I can score "mod" points
3. It's not in my nature to waste words, or to waste time
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs
