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El Reg gets around to Nix drama (www.theregister.com)
submitted 6 months ago by flizzo@awful.systems to c/freeasm@awful.systems

...except Liam can't decide whether to be a boomer or a piss baby about it.

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[-] autotldr 1 points 6 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


VR murder headset inventor Palmer Luckey's "AI" powered combat-drone maker Anduril is a big user, and offered to sponsor the annual Nix conference last year, to considerable controversy.

Nix enthusiasts point out that this delivers lots of benefits, but to achieve these, you have to just… trust that your path and so on will work and stuff will just auto-magically be found somehow.

It offers better isolation between components than the classic Unix approach of dumping all binaries in /bin… or /usr/bin or /sbin or /usr/sbin or /usr/local/bin, according to some arcane system that last made sense on a DEC PDP with half a dozen 5MB hard disks in 1972.

One possible issue is that this could result in very long directory paths, but with all the work on next-generation filesystems from Btrfs to OpenZFS to bcachefs, this can surely be addressed.

Gobo retains the classic Unix directory tree, empty apart from lots of symbolic links, for backwards-compatibility, but hides it from human users with the GoboHide kernel module.

As Michael Brantley, CTO of Nix vendor Flox told us at FOSDEM, after three decades administering proprietary Unix machines and later Linux ones:


The original article contains 1,072 words, the summary contains 192 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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