Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Lamar Owen]

On 2/24/21 3:49 PM, Johnny Hughes wrote:

Not that it matters .. BUT .. EL8 is much harder to build for.  There
are modular components, not all the Devel files exist, etc.

It is much harder than EL7.
And that difficulty shows; more stable perhaps, but many fewer 
packages.  Is there a reference anywhere to how modularity is supposed 
to work?


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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Gionatan Danti]

Il 2021-02-25 22:35 Stephen John Smoogen ha scritto:

Mainly because customers don't want to pay for that work which is
considerable. If Red Hat builds it, it is expected to have all kinds of
'promises' equivalent to its other products and that is expensive in 
terms

of QA, engineering, documentation, various certifications, etc. Package
growth goes up quickly so if people are complaining about the cost of a
RHEL license for 4000 src rpms, then what would it be at 20,000 to 
30,000.
It is easier to allow the community to choose to do the work it wants 
and

then 'consumers' of said repository get what they can.


[Including Valeri] I doubt it. Price is mainly defined by offer and 
demand (which is, in turn, driven by how much value the customer put 
behind the product). While production/support cost can put a lower bound 
on it, I don't think this is the case for Red Hat.


Anyway, Red Hat did not have to supporto EPEL packages the same as core 
one - even a best effort support would be enough in many cases. The 
point is that EPEL does not only contains nice-to-have packages, but 
sometimes provide really important packages.


As an (outdated) example, a decade ago Cyrus with mysql backend was only 
provided by EPEL. For a more up-to-date example, consider how difficult 
is to run a "plain" CentOS 7 system - it misses monit, mbuffer, smem, 
x2go, various Perl modules, etc.


You EPEL volunteers do an outstanding works - I would really than for 
all you did (free of charge) for the CentOS community. Red Hat should 
recognize and support your works.



I think the industry is entering another crux point where 'classical'
system administration will be in the same class as mainframe/miniframe
system administration were in the late 1980's and early 1990's with 
Unix
systems and then Linux. Our wor will remain incredibly important to 
various

industries but it will increasingly be a smaller amount of 'total
deployments'.  Which is why so many of our conversations echo so much 
of
the USEnet in the early-1990s, where mainframes/miniframes admins 
wondered

why companies were not focusing on their industries anymore.


Well, in a sense, the new cloud frenzy is something similar to a "remote 
mainframe" used with a new type of thin client (the browser). Yeah, I 
know this is a very stretched analogy...


I should say that I saw so many services deployed "to the cloud" that 
are plain broken/misbehaving that it sometime worries me. My (naive?) 
impression is that we are switching from "few specific services which 
correctly work unless something bad happen" to a 
"mess-which-more-or-happens-to-works but nobody know what to do if it 
does not" model.


I recently debugged an IPSec tunnel between an on-premise appliace and a 
Azure VPN services. The on premise appliance has extensive log and 
inspection tools, while on the Azure side we had litelly *nothing*. An 
Azure consultant was taken on board to help with specifig Powershell 
sniplet, to no avail. After 7+ days, a 3rd level Microsoft support 
engineer change a *private* setting on that VPN gateway service and the 
tunnel started working correctly.


On another case, a Win2008R2 machine stopped working in a AWS instance. 
No console, no logs. After 2+ weeks of paid "gold/premium" support from 
an Amazon enginer, my customer simply decided to detach the virtual disk 
and to attach it to another machine, reinstallaing the server.


Are we sure this is the way to go?

Don't get me wrong - "the cloud" is the natural places for things as web 
and mail server. A virtualized domain controller? Mmm... not so much.


But hey - I understand this is not going to change. The very same CentOS 
switch was done to please the cloud vendors, which will have a more 
"dynamic" base to rebuild. But I don't like how Red Hat does not simply 
produce a different product or profile for the cloud needs, rather than 
actively adding complexity at every layer.


Regards.

--
Danti Gionatan
Supporto Tecnico
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email: g.da...@assyoma.it - i...@assyoma.it
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 16:10, Gionatan Danti  wrote:

> Il 2021-02-25 14:27 Simon Matter ha scritto:
> > EL on the other side has a very limited, supported package set and
> > therefore a lot of packages needed to build a lot of packages are just
> > missing.
>
> Yeah, same impressions here. EPEL really is a key package repository for
> RHEL - and I always wondered why they did not invest into maintaining
> (and extending) this excellent repo.
>
>
Mainly because customers don't want to pay for that work which is
considerable. If Red Hat builds it, it is expected to have all kinds of
'promises' equivalent to its other products and that is expensive in terms
of QA, engineering, documentation, various certifications, etc. Package
growth goes up quickly so if people are complaining about the cost of a
RHEL license for 4000 src rpms, then what would it be at 20,000 to 30,000.
It is easier to allow the community to choose to do the work it wants and
then 'consumers' of said repository get what they can.


> I think RH now is extremely focused on cloud and SaaS platform, which
> leave us "normal" sysadmin in an uncomfortable situation...
>
>
I think the industry is entering another crux point where 'classical'
system administration will be in the same class as mainframe/miniframe
system administration were in the late 1980's and early 1990's with Unix
systems and then Linux. Our wor will remain incredibly important to various
industries but it will increasingly be a smaller amount of 'total
deployments'.  Which is why so many of our conversations echo so much of
the USEnet in the early-1990s, where mainframes/miniframes admins wondered
why companies were not focusing on their industries anymore.



> Regards.
>
> --
> Danti Gionatan
> Supporto Tecnico
> Assyoma S.r.l. - www.assyoma.it
> email: g.da...@assyoma.it - i...@assyoma.it
> GPG public key ID: FF5F32A8
> ___
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS@centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>


-- 
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Valeri Galtsev]

On 2/25/21 3:09 PM, Gionatan Danti wrote:

Il 2021-02-25 14:27 Simon Matter ha scritto:

EL on the other side has a very limited, supported package set and
therefore a lot of packages needed to build a lot of packages are just
missing.


Yeah, same impressions here. EPEL really is a key package repository for 
RHEL - and I always wondered why they did not invest into maintaining 
(and extending) this excellent repo.




How about this reason. Paid customers when have issue place support 
call, and their issue MUST be resolved promptly, it is part of contract 
with RedHat. To maintain as vast number of stuff as EPEL contains will 
require RedHat to charge customers proportionally higher, whereas these 
have only slim base of paid customers who use them.


Just a guess.

Whatever RedHat was doing [in the past] they knew how to do the business 
(until recently when they were bough out as a result of poor decisions - 
or maybe because they were doing business really well).


Valeri

I think RH now is extremely focused on cloud and SaaS platform, which 
leave us "normal" sysadmin in an uncomfortable situation...


Regards.



--

Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247

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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Gionatan Danti]

Il 2021-02-25 14:27 Simon Matter ha scritto:

EL on the other side has a very limited, supported package set and
therefore a lot of packages needed to build a lot of packages are just
missing.


Yeah, same impressions here. EPEL really is a key package repository for 
RHEL - and I always wondered why they did not invest into maintaining 
(and extending) this excellent repo.


I think RH now is extremely focused on cloud and SaaS platform, which 
leave us "normal" sysadmin in an uncomfortable situation...


Regards.

--
Danti Gionatan
Supporto Tecnico
Assyoma S.r.l. - www.assyoma.it
email: g.da...@assyoma.it - i...@assyoma.it
GPG public key ID: FF5F32A8
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[J Martin Rushton via CentOS]

On 25/02/2021 20:56, Simon Matter wrote:



On 25/02/2021 18:18, Leon Fauster via CentOS wrote:

Am 25.02.21 um 15:12 schrieb J Martin Rushton via CentOS:



On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:






I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming"
from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes
of Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I
really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
ever more.



Well, do "ldd /bin/awk" and you see interconnected dependencies.

I see it the same way and if I want, I would see it the same way with
a broader view. Do one job well - interaction with the user, Gnome.
Do one job well - when a service is stopped, it is stopped (systemd).

So it depends of the scope of view. Sure, there are tools that try
to do everything. One that came into my mind is YasT from SuSE.
That one I would classify as not fitting into the common unix
philosophy.


--
Leon


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I don't want to get bogged down in arguments about which application has
the most dependencies.  It's really a matter of scale.  Depending upon a
few system libraries is reasonable, but when when the ramifications
extend to dozens then perhaps a pause for thought might be suggested?
Oh and BTW:

bash-4.2$ ldd /bin/awk
linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x7ffcc876a000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x7fcd25995000)
libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x7fcd25693000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x7fcd252c5000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x7fcd25b99000)



That's on which OS? Certainly not EL8, right?


C7
--
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Simon Matter]

>
>
> On 25/02/2021 18:18, Leon Fauster via CentOS wrote:
>> Am 25.02.21 um 15:12 schrieb J Martin Rushton via CentOS:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>>> 
>

>>> I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming"
>>> from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
>>> Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
>>> creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes
>>> of Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I
>>> really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
>>> management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
>>> ever more.
>>
>>
>> Well, do "ldd /bin/awk" and you see interconnected dependencies.
>>
>> I see it the same way and if I want, I would see it the same way with
>> a broader view. Do one job well - interaction with the user, Gnome.
>> Do one job well - when a service is stopped, it is stopped (systemd).
>>
>> So it depends of the scope of view. Sure, there are tools that try
>> to do everything. One that came into my mind is YasT from SuSE.
>> That one I would classify as not fitting into the common unix
>> philosophy.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Leon
>>
> ___
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>
> I don't want to get bogged down in arguments about which application has
> the most dependencies.  It's really a matter of scale.  Depending upon a
> few system libraries is reasonable, but when when the ramifications
> extend to dozens then perhaps a pause for thought might be suggested?
> Oh and BTW:
>
> bash-4.2$ ldd /bin/awk
>   linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x7ffcc876a000)
>   libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x7fcd25995000)
>   libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x7fcd25693000)
>   libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x7fcd252c5000)
>   /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x7fcd25b99000)
>

That's on which OS? Certainly not EL8, right?

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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[J Martin Rushton via CentOS]

On 25/02/2021 18:18, Leon Fauster via CentOS wrote:

Am 25.02.21 um 15:12 schrieb J Martin Rushton via CentOS:



On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:





I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming" 
from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX), 
Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse 
creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes 
of Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I 
really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of 
management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do 
ever more.



Well, do "ldd /bin/awk" and you see interconnected dependencies.

I see it the same way and if I want, I would see it the same way with
a broader view. Do one job well - interaction with the user, Gnome.
Do one job well - when a service is stopped, it is stopped (systemd).

So it depends of the scope of view. Sure, there are tools that try
to do everything. One that came into my mind is YasT from SuSE.
That one I would classify as not fitting into the common unix
philosophy.


--
Leon


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I don't want to get bogged down in arguments about which application has 
the most dependencies.  It's really a matter of scale.  Depending upon a 
few system libraries is reasonable, but when when the ramifications 
extend to dozens then perhaps a pause for thought might be suggested? 
Oh and BTW:


bash-4.2$ ldd /bin/awk
linux-vdso.so.1 =>  (0x7ffcc876a000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x7fcd25995000)
libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x7fcd25693000)
libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x7fcd252c5000)
/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x7fcd25b99000)
bash-4.2$

-- which seems reasonable to me.

--
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Leon Fauster via CentOS]

Am 25.02.21 um 15:12 schrieb J Martin Rushton via CentOS:



On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

They run into the same interdependency.. but because they have 
organically

grown their distro every day, those dependencies grew 1 at a time.

For EPEL and other EL repos you have to jump multiple Fedora releases to
catch up. So in EL6 we were Fedora Linux 12. In EL7.0 we had to jump and
rebuild from scratch a lot of Fedora Linux 18 and Fedora Linux 19 and 
then
progressed up to about Fedora 24 as various parts got rebased and 
upgraded

to 7.9. For EL8, we have to jump to Fedora Linux 28 and then each dot
release rebase parts while keeping other parts back because rebasing is
focused. [This means that if something needs glibc-2.32 you can't put 
it in
EL8 without a lot of patching to make it work with whatever changed... 
but

some other related components may be able to recompile fine.]

Thus you need people who enjoy that kind of work to do this because 
EPEL is
nearly all volunteer work. I had to work after hours or take vacation 
time

to work on getting EPEL-8 out so that I could get focused effort on it.
Most people don't have that 'luxury' and so the number of volunteers is
small but the expectation that it will be there is large.




Tony Schreiner
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I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming" 
from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX), 
Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse 
creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes of 
Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I 
really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of 
management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do 
ever more.



Well, do "ldd /bin/awk" and you see interconnected dependencies.

I see it the same way and if I want, I would see it the same way with
a broader view. Do one job well - interaction with the user, Gnome.
Do one job well - when a service is stopped, it is stopped (systemd).

So it depends of the scope of view. Sure, there are tools that try
to do everything. One that came into my mind is YasT from SuSE.
That one I would classify as not fitting into the common unix
philosophy.


--
Leon
















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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[J Martin Rushton via CentOS]

On 25/02/2021 16:54, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:



On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 10:07, J Martin Rushton 
mailto:martinrushto...@btinternet.com>> 
wrote:




On 25/02/2021 14:49, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
 >
 >
 > On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 09:13, J Martin Rushton via CentOS
 > mailto:centos@centos.org>
>> wrote:
 >
 >
 >
 >     On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
 >
 >     I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX
Programming"
 >     from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of
UNIX),
 >     Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
 >     creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The
 >     likes of
 >     Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this
philosophy.  I
 >     really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
 >     management over the last 20 years as applications are
stretched to do
 >     ever more.
 >
 >
 > Maybe but everytime someone says "I think these are too complex"
they
 > then turn around and say "but I really need this to do this one more
 > thing." Also the complexity of tools is generational. The oldschool
 > 1970's Unix people were screaming that the 1980's software was too
 > complex because various flags had been added to central commands.
The
 > 1980's people complained that even early Linux was too complex
because
 > it had so much more software that depended on each other. And so
forth.
 >
 > In the X11 world, there were as many people saying FVWM was way too
 > complex when twm was all you needed and it was making software
too hard
 > to build. BUT could you get twm to work on our new monitor which
has a
 > different view screen feature that made the fonts look like crap.
 >
 > The counter argument I heard from a 1970's Unix era person was
"Software
 > gets more complicated over time as we find that more problems
need to be
 > solved. You either keep up with it, or get out of software." He was
 > working in software until his death a short while ago in his 80's.
 >
 >     --
 >     J Martin Rushton MBCS
 >     ___
 >     CentOS mailing list
 > CentOS@centos.org 
>
 > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

 >     >
 >
 >
 >
 > --
 > Stephen J Smoogen.
 >
The irony being that moving to UNIX I had it drummed into me that the
one tool-one job ethos was a great advance upon the rigidly defined and
integrated monolith of VMS.  Oh, and that was in the 1990s.
-- 
J Martin Rushton MBCS



And everyone I worked with told me that Unix was a poor reinvention of 
TSX-11 where you could get real work done. But since VMS came out over a 
decade after Unix, I can't say Unix is an advance over VMS.


In any case this is devolving into the 4 Yorkshiremen skit so I am done 
here.


--
Stephen J Smoogen.


Oi! Lay off Yorkshiremen.  It'll only be envy that you weren't born one. :-)
--
J Martin Rushton MBCS
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 10:07, J Martin Rushton <
martinrushto...@btinternet.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 25/02/2021 14:49, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 09:13, J Martin Rushton via CentOS
> > mailto:centos@centos.org>> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> >
> > I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX
> Programming"
> > from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
> > Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
> > creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The
> > likes of
> > Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I
> > really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
> > management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
> > ever more.
> >
> >
> > Maybe but everytime someone says "I think these are too complex" they
> > then turn around and say "but I really need this to do this one more
> > thing." Also the complexity of tools is generational. The oldschool
> > 1970's Unix people were screaming that the 1980's software was too
> > complex because various flags had been added to central commands. The
> > 1980's people complained that even early Linux was too complex because
> > it had so much more software that depended on each other. And so forth.
> >
> > In the X11 world, there were as many people saying FVWM was way too
> > complex when twm was all you needed and it was making software too hard
> > to build. BUT could you get twm to work on our new monitor which has a
> > different view screen feature that made the fonts look like crap.
> >
> > The counter argument I heard from a 1970's Unix era person was "Software
> > gets more complicated over time as we find that more problems need to be
> > solved. You either keep up with it, or get out of software." He was
> > working in software until his death a short while ago in his 80's.
> >
> > --
> > J Martin Rushton MBCS
> > ___
> > CentOS mailing list
> > CentOS@centos.org 
> > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> > 
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Stephen J Smoogen.
> >
> The irony being that moving to UNIX I had it drummed into me that the
> one tool-one job ethos was a great advance upon the rigidly defined and
> integrated monolith of VMS.  Oh, and that was in the 1990s.
> --
> J Martin Rushton MBCS
>

And everyone I worked with told me that Unix was a poor reinvention of
TSX-11 where you could get real work done. But since VMS came out over a
decade after Unix, I can't say Unix is an advance over VMS.

In any case this is devolving into the 4 Yorkshiremen skit so I am done
here.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Valeri Galtsev]

On 2/25/21 8:28 AM, Simon Matter wrote:



On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:


They run into the same interdependency.. but because they have
organically
grown their distro every day, those dependencies grew 1 at a time.

For EPEL and other EL repos you have to jump multiple Fedora releases to
catch up. So in EL6 we were Fedora Linux 12. In EL7.0 we had to jump and
rebuild from scratch a lot of Fedora Linux 18 and Fedora Linux 19 and
then
progressed up to about Fedora 24 as various parts got rebased and
upgraded
to 7.9. For EL8, we have to jump to Fedora Linux 28 and then each dot
release rebase parts while keeping other parts back because rebasing is
focused. [This means that if something needs glibc-2.32 you can't put it
in
EL8 without a lot of patching to make it work with whatever changed...
but
some other related components may be able to recompile fine.]

Thus you need people who enjoy that kind of work to do this because EPEL
is
nearly all volunteer work. I had to work after hours or take vacation
time
to work on getting EPEL-8 out so that I could get focused effort on it.
Most people don't have that 'luxury' and so the number of volunteers is
small but the expectation that it will be there is large.




Tony Schreiner
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I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming"
from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes of
Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I
really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
ever more.
--
J Martin Rushton MBCS


Or you can say it with Henry Spencers words:

Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.



Alas, the whole thing stems from more global trend. The world became 
ruled pretty much on all levels by bureaucrats. They have no real 
knowledge or hands on experience in the field they rule. The paradigm 
for them is: they can find and hire (and replace on the whim) those who 
will do actual job. Without knowledge the only way they can select whom 
to hire is by looking at the number of certificates.Those are abundant 
mostly in relation to MS products.The judgement of how well systems are 
maintained is based on checked boxes in questionnaires such as "is 
antivirus installed?" (which is irrelevant to UNIX, Linux or MacOS 
systems)... And, of course, they are willing the "anti-virus style" 
scanner run [with root privileges] from their [much less secure] box on 
your UNIX machines. Whereas long ago it was established that anti-virus 
idea is logically flawed: you can not enumerate bad, you can enumerate 
good and prohibit everything else.


And the list goes on and on...

Which pretty much explains the deficiencies we observe today in the 
state of the art.


Just my $0.02

Valeri

--

Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247

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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[J Martin Rushton via CentOS]

On 25/02/2021 14:49, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:



On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 09:13, J Martin Rushton via CentOS 
mailto:centos@centos.org>> wrote:




On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:

I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming"
from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The
likes of
Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I
really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
ever more.


Maybe but everytime someone says "I think these are too complex" they 
then turn around and say "but I really need this to do this one more 
thing." Also the complexity of tools is generational. The oldschool 
1970's Unix people were screaming that the 1980's software was too 
complex because various flags had been added to central commands. The 
1980's people complained that even early Linux was too complex because 
it had so much more software that depended on each other. And so forth.


In the X11 world, there were as many people saying FVWM was way too 
complex when twm was all you needed and it was making software too hard 
to build. BUT could you get twm to work on our new monitor which has a 
different view screen feature that made the fonts look like crap.


The counter argument I heard from a 1970's Unix era person was "Software 
gets more complicated over time as we find that more problems need to be 
solved. You either keep up with it, or get out of software." He was 
working in software until his death a short while ago in his 80's.


-- 
J Martin Rushton MBCS

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--
Stephen J Smoogen.

The irony being that moving to UNIX I had it drummed into me that the 
one tool-one job ethos was a great advance upon the rigidly defined and 
integrated monolith of VMS.  Oh, and that was in the 1990s.

--
J Martin Rushton MBCS
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 09:13, J Martin Rushton via CentOS 
wrote:

>
>
> On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
>
> I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming"
> from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
> Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
> creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes of
> Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I
> really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
> management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
> ever more.
>

Maybe but everytime someone says "I think these are too complex" they then
turn around and say "but I really need this to do this one more thing."
Also the complexity of tools is generational. The oldschool 1970's Unix
people were screaming that the 1980's software was too complex because
various flags had been added to central commands. The 1980's people
complained that even early Linux was too complex because it had so much
more software that depended on each other. And so forth.

In the X11 world, there were as many people saying FVWM was way too complex
when twm was all you needed and it was making software too hard to build.
BUT could you get twm to work on our new monitor which has a different view
screen feature that made the fonts look like crap.

The counter argument I heard from a 1970's Unix era person was "Software
gets more complicated over time as we find that more problems need to be
solved. You either keep up with it, or get out of software." He was working
in software until his death a short while ago in his 80's.


> --
> J Martin Rushton MBCS
> ___
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS@centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Jonathan Billings]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 02:12:39PM +, J Martin Rushton via CentOS wrote:
> I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming" from
> 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX), Kernigham (C
> and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse creating "little tools"
> that do one job reliably and well.  The likes of Gnome or systemd certainly
> would never fit into this philosophy.  I really think we have lost a lot of
> maintainability and ease of management over the last 20 years as
> applications are stretched to do ever more.

If every tool we used were self-contained, build-it-all-from-scratch,
our desktops would be a huge mess.  Nothing would work with another
tool, you'd have widely varying user interfaces, you'd never have
something like X11 or Wayland.

Sure, that attitude is fine for command line tools, but a huge part of
the open source world is taking advantage of toolkits provided to make
life easier for the programmer.  The world is a lot more complicated
than in the K days.  When I worked at Princeton, Kernighan was
teaching courses using Python (and Go now, I think).  (Really cool
guy) 

Heck, 'systemd' is a really complicated beast, but it doesn't have a
huge number of interconnected dependencies.  I think bringing it up
isn't really appropriate for this thread, since it actually does a
pretty good job of keeping the requirements down, so it can run in
minimal instances.

-- 
Jonathan Billings 
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Simon Matter]

>
>
> On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> 
>> They run into the same interdependency.. but because they have
>> organically
>> grown their distro every day, those dependencies grew 1 at a time.
>>
>> For EPEL and other EL repos you have to jump multiple Fedora releases to
>> catch up. So in EL6 we were Fedora Linux 12. In EL7.0 we had to jump and
>> rebuild from scratch a lot of Fedora Linux 18 and Fedora Linux 19 and
>> then
>> progressed up to about Fedora 24 as various parts got rebased and
>> upgraded
>> to 7.9. For EL8, we have to jump to Fedora Linux 28 and then each dot
>> release rebase parts while keeping other parts back because rebasing is
>> focused. [This means that if something needs glibc-2.32 you can't put it
>> in
>> EL8 without a lot of patching to make it work with whatever changed...
>> but
>> some other related components may be able to recompile fine.]
>>
>> Thus you need people who enjoy that kind of work to do this because EPEL
>> is
>> nearly all volunteer work. I had to work after hours or take vacation
>> time
>> to work on getting EPEL-8 out so that I could get focused effort on it.
>> Most people don't have that 'luxury' and so the number of volunteers is
>> small but the expectation that it will be there is large.
>>
>>
>>
>>> Tony Schreiner
>>> ___
>>> CentOS mailing list
>>> CentOS@centos.org
>>> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>>>
>>
>>
> I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming"
> from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX),
> Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse
> creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes of
> Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I
> really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of
> management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do
> ever more.
> --
> J Martin Rushton MBCS

Or you can say it with Henry Spencers words:

Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[J Martin Rushton via CentOS]

On 25/02/2021 13:37, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:


They run into the same interdependency.. but because they have organically
grown their distro every day, those dependencies grew 1 at a time.

For EPEL and other EL repos you have to jump multiple Fedora releases to
catch up. So in EL6 we were Fedora Linux 12. In EL7.0 we had to jump and
rebuild from scratch a lot of Fedora Linux 18 and Fedora Linux 19 and then
progressed up to about Fedora 24 as various parts got rebased and upgraded
to 7.9. For EL8, we have to jump to Fedora Linux 28 and then each dot
release rebase parts while keeping other parts back because rebasing is
focused. [This means that if something needs glibc-2.32 you can't put it in
EL8 without a lot of patching to make it work with whatever changed... but
some other related components may be able to recompile fine.]

Thus you need people who enjoy that kind of work to do this because EPEL is
nearly all volunteer work. I had to work after hours or take vacation time
to work on getting EPEL-8 out so that I could get focused effort on it.
Most people don't have that 'luxury' and so the number of volunteers is
small but the expectation that it will be there is large.




Tony Schreiner
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I was recently looking at Raymond's book "The Art of UNIX Programming" 
from 2003.  He, along with contributors Thompson (inventor of UNIX), 
Kernigham (C and AWK), Korn and others of that callibre, espouse 
creating "little tools" that do one job reliably and well.  The likes of 
Gnome or systemd certainly would never fit into this philosophy.  I 
really think we have lost a lot of maintainability and ease of 
management over the last 20 years as applications are stretched to do 
ever more.

--
J Martin Rushton MBCS
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 08:18, Tony Schreiner 
wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 7:31 AM Stephen John Smoogen 
> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 02:11, Simon Matter 
> wrote:
> >
> > > >>
> > > >> Smooge, you know I feel your pain, but becoming a maintainer in EPEL
> > has
> > > >> a pretty high bar (lots of new tools and methods to work with,
> amongst
> > > >> other things) -- as it SHOULD, given that it's intended as an addon
> to
> > > >> EL and needs to be very tightly controlled.  It's just more
> difficult
> > to
> > > >> get started these days relative to when anyone could build an rpm as
> > > >> long as they had a copy of Maximum RPM and knew how to drive 'rpm
> -ba'
> > > >>  back when building as root in a non-reproducible buildroot
> > wasn't a
> > > >> cardinal sin.
> > > >>
> > > >
> > > > Not that it matters .. BUT .. EL8 is much harder to build for.  There
> > > > are modular components, not all the Devel files exist, etc.
> > > >
> > > > It is much harder than EL7.
> > >
> > > Thanks Johnny for reminding. I was wondering why the situation for EL8
> is
> > > so much worse than for EL7 and that was true before CentOS Stream came
> > up.
> > >
> > > In the end I have never been happy with the new modules system and how
> it
> > > makes packaging much more difficult than it was and than it should be.
> > >
> > > IMHO the hurdles to build high quality packages should be as simple as
> > > possible but the difficulties to do so went in the wrong direction. The
> > > result we see now. Today we have an unstable distribution (Fedora)
> with a
> > > quite good and comprehensive package set, and we have stable (EL) with
> an
> > > unstable and lacking package set.
> > >
> > >
> > Even without modules (A person wrote a program which undid some of those
> > problems for us in EPEL), EL8 is not easy to build. Packages and software
> > themselves have gotten more interdependent and complex. This leads to a
> > larger and larger chain of 'buildrequires' and 'requires' for each
> package.
> > To get some of the XFCE packages into EPEL you need to bring into EPEL
> all
> > kinds of quaternary packages so you can build the tertiary packages which
> > are needed for the secondary packages which allow you to get something
> like
> > xfce4-cpufreq-plugin-1.2.1-7.fc33.src.rpm built. Each of those packages
> > needs a maintainer who wants to deal with them in EPEL which requires
> them
> > to run an EL to test.
> >
> > I tried an experiment during the RHEL-8 beta to see what it would take to
> > get EPEL-8 1:1 with EPEL-7.. I gave up after adding nearly a thousand
> > packages to the 'build chain' which were not in EPEL-7 nor even in the
> > RHEL-8 beta or its 'buildroot'. These were mainly packages that are in
> > Fedora already and would need to be maintained in EPEL and no one wants
> to
> > do that.
> >
> > This was supposed to be a problem modularity was to fix.. so you need 100
> > packages not in EPEL for your 1 application set, and you don't  want to
> > maintain those extra packages? Just put them inside your module build
> chain
> > and deliver what you wanted. Of course that is still a monumental task
> and
> > most packagers would say 'meh I got better things to do, like do a root
> > canal without anesthesia.'
> >
>
> Does package building for debian and derivatives not run into this same
> issue of interdependency? Is it because they have more packages to begin
> with?
> Not judging, I'm curious.
>
>
They run into the same interdependency.. but because they have organically
grown their distro every day, those dependencies grew 1 at a time.

For EPEL and other EL repos you have to jump multiple Fedora releases to
catch up. So in EL6 we were Fedora Linux 12. In EL7.0 we had to jump and
rebuild from scratch a lot of Fedora Linux 18 and Fedora Linux 19 and then
progressed up to about Fedora 24 as various parts got rebased and upgraded
to 7.9. For EL8, we have to jump to Fedora Linux 28 and then each dot
release rebase parts while keeping other parts back because rebasing is
focused. [This means that if something needs glibc-2.32 you can't put it in
EL8 without a lot of patching to make it work with whatever changed... but
some other related components may be able to recompile fine.]

Thus you need people who enjoy that kind of work to do this because EPEL is
nearly all volunteer work. I had to work after hours or take vacation time
to work on getting EPEL-8 out so that I could get focused effort on it.
Most people don't have that 'luxury' and so the number of volunteers is
small but the expectation that it will be there is large.



> Tony Schreiner
> ___
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS@centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Simon Matter]

> On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 7:31 AM Stephen John Smoogen 
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 02:11, Simon Matter 
>> wrote:
>>
>> > >>
>> > >> Smooge, you know I feel your pain, but becoming a maintainer in
>> EPEL
>> has
>> > >> a pretty high bar (lots of new tools and methods to work with,
>> amongst
>> > >> other things) -- as it SHOULD, given that it's intended as an addon
>> to
>> > >> EL and needs to be very tightly controlled.  It's just more
>> difficult
>> to
>> > >> get started these days relative to when anyone could build an rpm
>> as
>> > >> long as they had a copy of Maximum RPM and knew how to drive 'rpm
>> -ba'
>> > >>  back when building as root in a non-reproducible buildroot
>> wasn't a
>> > >> cardinal sin.
>> > >>
>> > >
>> > > Not that it matters .. BUT .. EL8 is much harder to build for.
>> There
>> > > are modular components, not all the Devel files exist, etc.
>> > >
>> > > It is much harder than EL7.
>> >
>> > Thanks Johnny for reminding. I was wondering why the situation for EL8
>> is
>> > so much worse than for EL7 and that was true before CentOS Stream came
>> up.
>> >
>> > In the end I have never been happy with the new modules system and how
>> it
>> > makes packaging much more difficult than it was and than it should be.
>> >
>> > IMHO the hurdles to build high quality packages should be as simple as
>> > possible but the difficulties to do so went in the wrong direction.
>> The
>> > result we see now. Today we have an unstable distribution (Fedora)
>> with a
>> > quite good and comprehensive package set, and we have stable (EL) with
>> an
>> > unstable and lacking package set.
>> >
>> >
>> Even without modules (A person wrote a program which undid some of those
>> problems for us in EPEL), EL8 is not easy to build. Packages and
>> software
>> themselves have gotten more interdependent and complex. This leads to a
>> larger and larger chain of 'buildrequires' and 'requires' for each
>> package.
>> To get some of the XFCE packages into EPEL you need to bring into EPEL
>> all
>> kinds of quaternary packages so you can build the tertiary packages
>> which
>> are needed for the secondary packages which allow you to get something
>> like
>> xfce4-cpufreq-plugin-1.2.1-7.fc33.src.rpm built. Each of those packages
>> needs a maintainer who wants to deal with them in EPEL which requires
>> them
>> to run an EL to test.
>>
>> I tried an experiment during the RHEL-8 beta to see what it would take
>> to
>> get EPEL-8 1:1 with EPEL-7.. I gave up after adding nearly a thousand
>> packages to the 'build chain' which were not in EPEL-7 nor even in the
>> RHEL-8 beta or its 'buildroot'. These were mainly packages that are in
>> Fedora already and would need to be maintained in EPEL and no one wants
>> to
>> do that.
>>
>> This was supposed to be a problem modularity was to fix.. so you need
>> 100
>> packages not in EPEL for your 1 application set, and you don't  want to
>> maintain those extra packages? Just put them inside your module build
>> chain
>> and deliver what you wanted. Of course that is still a monumental task
>> and
>> most packagers would say 'meh I got better things to do, like do a root
>> canal without anesthesia.'
>>
>>
>>
>> > Simon
>> >
>> > ___
>> > CentOS mailing list
>> > CentOS@centos.org
>> > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>> >
>>
>>
>> --
>> Stephen J Smoogen.
>> ___
>> CentOS mailing list
>> CentOS@centos.org
>> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>
>
> Does package building for debian and derivatives not run into this same
> issue of interdependency? Is it because they have more packages to begin
> with?
> Not judging, I'm curious.
>
> Tony Schreiner

Both Debian and Fedora have a much larger package base and try to keep
those alive step by step.

EL on the other side has a very limited, supported package set and
therefore a lot of packages needed to build a lot of packages are just
missing.

It's my impression that most development power goes into the limited base
system and cloud, container and all the newer fancy stuff.

Simon



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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Tony Schreiner]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 7:31 AM Stephen John Smoogen 
wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 02:11, Simon Matter  wrote:
>
> > >>
> > >> Smooge, you know I feel your pain, but becoming a maintainer in EPEL
> has
> > >> a pretty high bar (lots of new tools and methods to work with, amongst
> > >> other things) -- as it SHOULD, given that it's intended as an addon to
> > >> EL and needs to be very tightly controlled.  It's just more difficult
> to
> > >> get started these days relative to when anyone could build an rpm as
> > >> long as they had a copy of Maximum RPM and knew how to drive 'rpm -ba'
> > >>  back when building as root in a non-reproducible buildroot
> wasn't a
> > >> cardinal sin.
> > >>
> > >
> > > Not that it matters .. BUT .. EL8 is much harder to build for.  There
> > > are modular components, not all the Devel files exist, etc.
> > >
> > > It is much harder than EL7.
> >
> > Thanks Johnny for reminding. I was wondering why the situation for EL8 is
> > so much worse than for EL7 and that was true before CentOS Stream came
> up.
> >
> > In the end I have never been happy with the new modules system and how it
> > makes packaging much more difficult than it was and than it should be.
> >
> > IMHO the hurdles to build high quality packages should be as simple as
> > possible but the difficulties to do so went in the wrong direction. The
> > result we see now. Today we have an unstable distribution (Fedora) with a
> > quite good and comprehensive package set, and we have stable (EL) with an
> > unstable and lacking package set.
> >
> >
> Even without modules (A person wrote a program which undid some of those
> problems for us in EPEL), EL8 is not easy to build. Packages and software
> themselves have gotten more interdependent and complex. This leads to a
> larger and larger chain of 'buildrequires' and 'requires' for each package.
> To get some of the XFCE packages into EPEL you need to bring into EPEL all
> kinds of quaternary packages so you can build the tertiary packages which
> are needed for the secondary packages which allow you to get something like
> xfce4-cpufreq-plugin-1.2.1-7.fc33.src.rpm built. Each of those packages
> needs a maintainer who wants to deal with them in EPEL which requires them
> to run an EL to test.
>
> I tried an experiment during the RHEL-8 beta to see what it would take to
> get EPEL-8 1:1 with EPEL-7.. I gave up after adding nearly a thousand
> packages to the 'build chain' which were not in EPEL-7 nor even in the
> RHEL-8 beta or its 'buildroot'. These were mainly packages that are in
> Fedora already and would need to be maintained in EPEL and no one wants to
> do that.
>
> This was supposed to be a problem modularity was to fix.. so you need 100
> packages not in EPEL for your 1 application set, and you don't  want to
> maintain those extra packages? Just put them inside your module build chain
> and deliver what you wanted. Of course that is still a monumental task and
> most packagers would say 'meh I got better things to do, like do a root
> canal without anesthesia.'
>
>
>
> > Simon
> >
> > ___
> > CentOS mailing list
> > CentOS@centos.org
> > https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
> >
>
>
> --
> Stephen J Smoogen.
> ___
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS@centos.org
> https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos


Does package building for debian and derivatives not run into this same
issue of interdependency? Is it because they have more packages to begin
with?
Not judging, I'm curious.

Tony Schreiner
___
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Re: [CentOS] How to install XFCE on CentOS 8?

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 02:11, Simon Matter  wrote:

> >>
> >> Smooge, you know I feel your pain, but becoming a maintainer in EPEL has
> >> a pretty high bar (lots of new tools and methods to work with, amongst
> >> other things) -- as it SHOULD, given that it's intended as an addon to
> >> EL and needs to be very tightly controlled.  It's just more difficult to
> >> get started these days relative to when anyone could build an rpm as
> >> long as they had a copy of Maximum RPM and knew how to drive 'rpm -ba'
> >>  back when building as root in a non-reproducible buildroot wasn't a
> >> cardinal sin.
> >>
> >
> > Not that it matters .. BUT .. EL8 is much harder to build for.  There
> > are modular components, not all the Devel files exist, etc.
> >
> > It is much harder than EL7.
>
> Thanks Johnny for reminding. I was wondering why the situation for EL8 is
> so much worse than for EL7 and that was true before CentOS Stream came up.
>
> In the end I have never been happy with the new modules system and how it
> makes packaging much more difficult than it was and than it should be.
>
> IMHO the hurdles to build high quality packages should be as simple as
> possible but the difficulties to do so went in the wrong direction. The
> result we see now. Today we have an unstable distribution (Fedora) with a
> quite good and comprehensive package set, and we have stable (EL) with an
> unstable and lacking package set.
>
>
Even without modules (A person wrote a program which undid some of those
problems for us in EPEL), EL8 is not easy to build. Packages and software
themselves have gotten more interdependent and complex. This leads to a
larger and larger chain of 'buildrequires' and 'requires' for each package.
To get some of the XFCE packages into EPEL you need to bring into EPEL all
kinds of quaternary packages so you can build the tertiary packages which
are needed for the secondary packages which allow you to get something like
xfce4-cpufreq-plugin-1.2.1-7.fc33.src.rpm built. Each of those packages
needs a maintainer who wants to deal with them in EPEL which requires them
to run an EL to test.

I tried an experiment during the RHEL-8 beta to see what it would take to
get EPEL-8 1:1 with EPEL-7.. I gave up after adding nearly a thousand
packages to the 'build chain' which were not in EPEL-7 nor even in the
RHEL-8 beta or its 'buildroot'. These were mainly packages that are in
Fedora already and would need to be maintained in EPEL and no one wants to
do that.

This was supposed to be a problem modularity was to fix.. so you need 100
packages not in EPEL for your 1 application set, and you don't  want to
maintain those extra packages? Just put them inside your module build chain
and deliver what you wanted. Of course that is still a monumental task and
most packagers would say 'meh I got better things to do, like do a root
canal without anesthesia.'



> Simon
>
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-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
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