Arch Linux Update On The Status Of Its Toolchain

[Davidovitch]

Yes. Current Arch devs like the prestige that comes with their position, but don't want to put the work into the project, all the while they discourage people from joining and make it difficult and complicated to become an Arch dev, because they don't want competition and a danger to their positions from more eager new recruits....

I even read that in the case of a GNOME maintainer who took 2 months to update to GNOME 41, that he didn't do it earlier cause he was busy playing Fortnite or something like that. Someone wrote that he said it in the irc. Perhaps a lie or a rumor, but i wouldn't be surprised, seeing as it was a trouble-free upgrade and it took 2 months....

There are many people, especially CS students like you said, who would want to have the chance to contribute and place it in their resume. That is one of the main reason to join volunteer projects like this for many people. If they really cared about their distro, they would create a clear way to trial/recruit new people, and not the BS that exists currently.

I honestly understand what you are trying the say here, but it really doesn't make any sense once you take one step back and think about it. The way this work is simple: in open source land you take responsibility and actually contribute something. You are basically "accusing" a volunteer, who's work you literarily profit from, of not working hard enough for you. Who are you to demand if a contributor can play Fortnite, CS:GO or whatever? I mean, if that is not shameless entitlement, what is?

[maffblaster]

I went full circle (even beyond maybe): from Arch to Ubuntu in 2007, from Ubuntu to Gentoo in 2015.

Welcome back!

[Davidovitch]

I agree 100% with what you are saying. It is volunteer work and they are quick to remind you that fact when you dare point out issues. It is stunning to me that it is a guy that has no motivation doing the job that got the position. I am sure that there are plenty of talented students in CS departments across the world that would love to have the role for the fun of it and to be able to put that prestigious position in their resume...

I think you overestimate the amount of talented CS students that are willing to invest enormous amounts of free, unpaid developer time just to get such a prestigious position on their resume. There are other ways to build similarly impressive resumes, if not more impressive, and get paid at the same. Crazy, right? Who would want that?

[lano1106]

Well, I have compiled the whole toolchain on a CentOS system so I have a pretty good idea of the amount of work involved in this exercise.

If we exclude the work required to read upstream project emails to make sure that there is not an important security issue to patch, building the whole enchilada could take half a day, with unexpected issue perhaps a full day.

Now tell me, if you don't even have 4 hours of free time at least once every 6 months, why are you accepting the role???

By any means, this is not enormous amount of time. It is pretty easy to imagine a CS student that is actually using Arch and is passionate about Linux ,computers and C programming that he would not mind take that responsibility and learn from it with the same token.

Concerning the estimation of the amount of talented students. We are talking about a worldwide pool of talents. Take the 5 or 10 best students of every universities with probably hundreds of universities... How could you not have enough candidates?

Just on reddit, the archlinux group has 206K members. Considering that ArchLinux mostly attract tech-savy users, would it be overestimate that perhaps 1% of them would good enough dev to maintain a package?

For the record, I am not a lazy user that complains about volunteer bad work. I fully embrace the open source philosophy and I have made several patches for the Linux kernel. I may also have one in glibc.

The ArchLinux gcc/glibc/binutils management has been sloppy. I just hope that the community management has learned something from this episode and improve a bit from now on.

[STiAT]

Arch is so widely used including the derivates that I hope they'll find somebody.

That said, it's an issue of divide, the people using other distros mainly care about those, depriving arch of people who rather get involved there and taking arch as "granted", while it is all but that being built on the time of volunteers.

Arch had a great track record of being bleeding edge, but those things happen if you grow short on maintainers. And ye, one is not enough if you want to be fast.

I really hope for them they find somebody to share the load. Arch should not pain with staffing issues given their popularity as a base.

I do not use any arch based distro or arch at the moment though, too much hassle with opt depends, but I have used it for 13 years, was TU and still have a heartfelt love for it.

But I do consider it as a great base. But this base needs proper maintenance and people to shoulder it, not just reskins with an installer and a tool to install drivers (which basically is endeavouros, which seems tremendously popular these days).

[enihcam]

is there an arch linux without systemd ?

but Arch also has packages like dhcpcd, cron, logrotate, etc. and also ppl write non-systemd flavor config even systemd is installed by default.

however, i still use smartdns and chrony because systemd does not provide features like ad block, ptp sync, etc. of course systemd does not need to.

[h0tc0d3]

Unfortunately, the competence of some maintainers in Arch Linux is very low! They don't follow bug reports well. I had quite a few arguments with them. I even sent them a set of patches to update some packages, and they could not update many packages for a long time. I was disappointed by the ignorance of the maintainers! I also wrote quite a few patches for packages to work with glibc 3.14+. Therefore, I forked many important system components, and reworked many packages. https://archlinux.club/
I'm also currently busy rewriting fontconfig and have already fixed quite a few bugs and memory leaks. https://github.com/h0tc0d3/arch-pack...ovements.patch https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontc...e_requests/217 I'm going to rework the completely deprecated fontconfig code. And make it more secure and compliant with C17(It's the same as C11 with some fixes, code can compiled with C11 compiler).

[TemplarGR]

I honestly understand what you are trying the say here, but it really doesn't make any sense once you take one step back and think about it. The way this work is simple: in open source land you take responsibility and actually contribute something. You are basically "accusing" a volunteer, who's work you literarily profit from, of not working hard enough for you. Who are you to demand if a contributor can play Fortnite, CS:GO or whatever? I mean, if that is not shameless entitlement, what is?

Oh look, we have yet another Arch apologist here.... Did you read my previous post? I do not accuse him of not working enough for me for free, and i am not entitled to his work. I am accusing him of not notifying everyone that he can't perform the job he was assigned, and letting another one (or even myself if i could actually become an Arch dev after many years of pain and frustration and licking their boots for years) pick up the slack and getting it done. Do you understand the difference? If you do not understand the difference, you are part of the problem.

[Davidovitch]

Oh look, we have yet another Arch apologist here.... Did you read my previous post? I do not accuse him of not working enough for me for free, and i am not entitled to his work. I am accusing him of not notifying everyone that he can't perform the job he was assigned, and letting another one (or even myself if i could actually become an Arch dev after many years of pain and frustration and licking their boots for years) pick up the slack and getting it done. Do you understand the difference? If you do not understand the difference, you are part of the problem.

I hear you, and understand very well the point you are trying to make. It is just that I fundamentally disagree: the one that is not "picking up the slack" as you state is in my opinion not stopping anyone else from "picking up the slack". How could one open source contributor that is not doing anything stop another contributor from actually contributing? The only argument I can see is that the other contributor is not really contributing either, and fails to convince the rest of the team. The reality is that there is just not enough people who have the time/energy/knowledge/experience to do what it takes to "pick up the slack", unpaid.

We just have to agree to disagree.

[xhustler]

Yes. Current Arch devs like the prestige that comes with their position, but don't want to put the work into the project, all the while they discourage people from joining and make it difficult and complicated to become an Arch dev, because they don't want competition and a danger to their positions from more eager new recruits....

I even read that in the case of a GNOME maintainer who took 2 months to update to GNOME 41, that he didn't do it earlier cause he was busy playing Fortnite or something like that. Someone wrote that he said it in the irc. Perhaps a lie or a rumor, but i wouldn't be surprised, seeing as it was a trouble-free upgrade and it took 2 months....

There are many people, especially CS students like you said, who would want to have the chance to contribute and place it in their resume. That is one of the main reason to join volunteer projects like this for many people. If they really cared about their distro, they would create a clear way to trial/recruit new people, and not the BS that exists currently.

Not an Arch user but the old adage stands - too many cooks spoil the broth! That said, why not have a 'play' repo with a couple of eager devs to do the heavy lifting i.e compiling, testing flags, packaging and the core package maintainer simply does quality checks and publishes the packages.