Serpent OS Makes Progress On Packaging The GNOME 45 Desktop

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Serpent OS Makes Progress On Packaging The GNOME 45 Desktop

Ikey Doherty's Serpent OS Linux distribution continues being raised and over the past month made progress on packaging up various GNOME 45 desktop components, working on stateless system support with systemd, and other features...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Serpent-OS-February-2024

[anarki2]

I still couldn't figure out why calling other tools to mess around in /etc/passwd instead of the package doing it directly is an improvement, why it's called "stateless", and why removing such system users immediately after package removal is good for me, besides the fact that I'll have a whole bunch of files and directories with random IDs as owners, so that I wont' even be able to tell who the hell the owner was supposed to be.

[spicfoo]

I still couldn't figure out why calling other tools to mess around in /etc/passwd instead of the package doing it directly is an improvement, why it's called "stateless", and why removing such system users immediately after package removal is good for me, besides the fact that I'll have a whole bunch of files and directories with random IDs as owners, so that I wont' even be able to tell who the hell the owner was supposed to be.

First of all, Systemd userdb doesn't mess with /etc/passwd at all. You might want to start there for better understanding. Since you aren't mutating shared system files you have much better manageability. I haven't looked at what distro is doing specifically but as a quick example, in Fedora's implementation of this, you could run ostree admin config-diff and it will give you a full diff of everything that has changed locally.

[STiAT]

They rewrite tooling in Rust? That's actually interesting, wondered why they used D which is hardly popular. I think that's a good move banking on a more popular language for their tooling. Looking at the tools in github they made .. quite some progress there.

[ermo]

I still couldn't figure out why calling other tools to mess around in /etc/passwd instead of the package doing it directly is an improvement, why it's called "stateless", and why removing such system users immediately after package removal is good for me, besides the fact that I'll have a whole bunch of files and directories with random IDs as owners, so that I wont' even be able to tell who the hell the owner was supposed to be.

The tentative plan is to implement a cleanup feature for this, because with the permanent "registry" of known UIDs/GIDs this approach enables, said cleanup feature can trivially remove the files scattered around the system belonging to removed user/group entities.

[anarki2]

Uh, but does all this necessitate a separate distro? Why would anyone really badly need this?