New mailing list. Was Re: [dwm] musca wm
I suggested a while ago to merge wmii@ and dwm@ into hackers@, both lists are rather low level, and there is much overlap, and such a single list would be more fitting for new minor side projects and for 'offtopic' discussion. Right now when one has something to say that doesn't quite fit in wmii@ or dwm@, or that could fit in both, you have to pick one list at random, or to cross post, and both options suck. Peace uriel What do you think about creating an offtopic mailing list in suckless for discussing such kind of topics, instead of using the dwm@ one like nowadays happen. I think it's been the charme of dwm@ to discuss lot's of other things, so I'd rather keep it as it is for now ;) Kind regards, Anselm
Re: New mailing list. Was Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Uriel urie...@gmail.com wrote: I suggested a while ago to merge wmii@ and dwm@ into hackers@, both lists are rather low level, and there is much overlap, and such a single list would be more fitting for new minor side projects and for 'offtopic' discussion. I hope I am not alone in wishing that the users from the wmii list never make it into the dwm list. -- Samuel 'Shardz' Baldwin - staticfree.info/~samuel
Re: New mailing list. Was Re: [dwm] musca wm
Greetings. Uriel wrote: I suggested a while ago to merge wmii@ and dwm@ into hackers@, both lists are rather low level, and there is much overlap, and such a single list would be more fitting for new minor side projects and for 'offtopic' discussion. There is a philosophical distraction between wmii and dwm. I wouldn't recommend a merge of both. Right now when one has something to say that doesn't quite fit in wmii@ or dwm@, or that could fit in both, you have to pick one list at random, or to cross post, and both options suck. Wmii still exists? Didn't it die a while ago, when arg left its development? Sincerely, Christoph Lohmann
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Sat, 16 May 2009 03:31:24 +0200 pancake panc...@youterm.com wrote: I like perl but I agree but it is big for most of uses, but is fast and powerful. I would prefer to use nqp or miniperl which are minimal versions of p5 and p6 compiled at build time to compile itself and do some processing stuff that makes the build process more handful and controllable than using make. It is a huge sw, but miniperl is cool :) I don't give a toss about the size of software. Perl is a crappy language, that is why I don't like it. With all minimalistic softwares you have to offer features. However, by time more and more features needs to be added due to that they are needed. Anyway, it is not the size that matters, but rather how the software helps you do your job. As to Ubuntu, you can say what you like, but at least for me the maintenance time reduced dramatically after going from Debian to Ubuntu on the 5-6 machines I maintain. And that is something I appreciate, not how small space I can get a distribution to use... Besides, making a big comples software in a low level programming language is not the Thing To Do[tm] unless you plan to write and forget. -- Preben Randhol http://wee-free-lore.blogspot.com/
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:55:27PM +0200, Preben Randhol wrote: As to Ubuntu, you can say what you like, but at least for me the maintenance time reduced dramatically after going from Debian to Ubuntu on the 5-6 machines I maintain. And that is something I appreciate, not how small space I can get a distribution to use... The time it takes you to go from one version Ubuntu to another takes less time than upgrading a Debian machine? I don't think so.
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On 5/17/09, Jacob Todd jaketodd...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:55:27PM +0200, Preben Randhol wrote: As to Ubuntu, you can say what you like, but at least for me the maintenance time reduced dramatically after going from Debian to Ubuntu on the 5-6 machines I maintain. And that is something I appreciate, not how small space I can get a distribution to use... The time it takes you to go from one version Ubuntu to another takes less time than upgrading a Debian machine? I don't think so. Saying Ubuntu is faster than Debian or vice versa is like saying a green wagon is faster than a blue wagon. They're the same thing, and most of my admin time is spent undoing the stupid changes to upstream code. -- # Kurt H Maier
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 01:17:40PM +, Kurt H Maier wrote: On 5/17/09, Jacob Todd jaketodd...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:55:27PM +0200, Preben Randhol wrote: As to Ubuntu, you can say what you like, but at least for me the maintenance time reduced dramatically after going from Debian to Ubuntu on the 5-6 machines I maintain. And that is something I appreciate, not how small space I can get a distribution to use... The time it takes you to go from one version Ubuntu to another takes less time than upgrading a Debian machine? I don't think so. Saying Ubuntu is faster than Debian or vice versa is like saying a green wagon is faster than a blue wagon. They're the same thing, and most of my admin time is spent undoing the stupid changes to upstream code. I agree. I use Ubuntu, because its release cycles are shorter, but prefer Debian over Ubuntu, because Debian aims to be a free GNU/Linux Distribution while Ubuntu does not (some software Canonical produces is released as proprietary software). However, I don't see a big difference between Debian and Ubuntu for non-GNOME users. I was quite happy with CRUX until I had some clashes with the developers. Regards, Matthias-Christian
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 01:17:40PM +, Kurt H Maier wrote: On 5/17/09, Jacob Todd jaketodd...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:55:27PM +0200, Preben Randhol wrote: As to Ubuntu, you can say what you like, but at least for me the maintenance time reduced dramatically after going from Debian to Ubuntu on the 5-6 machines I maintain. And that is something I appreciate, not how small space I can get a distribution to use... The time it takes you to go from one version Ubuntu to another takes less time than upgrading a Debian machine? I don't think so. Saying Ubuntu is faster than Debian or vice versa is like saying a green wagon is faster than a blue wagon. They're the same thing, and most of my admin time is spent undoing the stupid changes to upstream code. -- # Kurt H Maier What I meant to imply was that you usually can't (or couldn't last time I check ed) go from one release of Ubuntu to the next, with out reinstalling the whole thing, unlike Debian, where you can do that.
Re: [dwm] musca wm
Hello, I upgrade my Ubuntu from 7.04 to 7.10, 8.04, and finally 8.10 successfully. I did not upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04 because I got a new hard disk on which I installed a fresh new Ubuntu 9.04. Frankly speaking, there are always something wrong after an upgrade, but it is not hard to keep Ubuntu working if you can spare several hours to fix those problems. For example, some old xorg.conf does not work with newer version of Xorg, dynamically compiled programs no longer work because old libraries are purged, or certain programs are no longer supported. These problems are common in most, if not all, distributions, and unavoidable if your distro keeps up to date. Haomin Wen On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 10:12 PM, Jacob Todd jaketodd...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 01:17:40PM +, Kurt H Maier wrote: On 5/17/09, Jacob Todd jaketodd...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:55:27PM +0200, Preben Randhol wrote: As to Ubuntu, you can say what you like, but at least for me the maintenance time reduced dramatically after going from Debian to Ubuntu on the 5-6 machines I maintain. And that is something I appreciate, not how small space I can get a distribution to use... The time it takes you to go from one version Ubuntu to another takes less time than upgrading a Debian machine? I don't think so. Saying Ubuntu is faster than Debian or vice versa is like saying a green wagon is faster than a blue wagon. They're the same thing, and most of my admin time is spent undoing the stupid changes to upstream code. -- # Kurt H Maier What I meant to imply was that you usually can't (or couldn't last time I check ed) go from one release of Ubuntu to the next, with out reinstalling the whole thing, unlike Debian, where you can do that.
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 12:55:27PM +0200, Preben Randhol wrote: As to Ubuntu, you can say what you like, but at least for me the maintenance time reduced dramatically after going from Debian to Ubuntu on the 5-6 machines I maintain. And that is something I appreciate, not how small space I can get a distribution to use... The time it takes you to go from one version Ubuntu to another takes less time than upgrading a Debian machine? I don't think so. Where did I say that? I'm talking about maintenance. Fixing problems, adding functionality etc...
Re: [dwm] musca wm
Greetings, Using a prefork or similar technique done by apache f.ex can really accelerate such tasks, so a minimal vi editor with nice features can be really achieved by delegating all such features to external apps or libraries a minimal application with a dozen external modules, processes, pipes to achieve the required functionality will be 10x slower and nastier than if these things were built in. Modularization isn't a cure-all - it has a direct impact on performance, user-friendliness, maintainability, and especially on simplicity. It's also hard to get right. anecdote when I last used wmii a long time ago, a lot of functionality was off the core. To listen for keybindings, you had to interface with a virtual filesystem (because plan9 is automatically cool, right?) - with a cli util that you had to start everytime to read/write/touch a file. To drive the keybinding logic, you had to run a complicated shell script (at least this was the default solution) that read keyboard events through pipes and wrote back control commands, everything through this vfs util. So to make me able to start a new terminal, you had to continuously run at least 3 extra processes and a lot of code. How is this minimal or suckless? No wonder a lot of us flocked to dwm... I believe in fast, simple, but powerful CLI interfaces rather than programs pared down to bones. To be quite honest, I'd miss the color functionality from ls, dpkg argument-expansion from my shell, or the standard arguments from all the GNU software - if this means supporting --version in true, so be it. I'm not running an embedded system, a 97k ls doesn't hurt me too much. (I realize this is the same argument MS supporters use to validate the existence of a multi-gigabyte Visual Studio etc, but let's be realistic people, 97k ls in 2009 vs. Visual goddamn Studio.) Best regards, Mate
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 03:50:58PM -0500, Kurt H Maier wrote: On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Mate Nagy mn...@port70.net wrote: i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have features (imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic hackjobs. Does /bin/ls really need to be 96kb? Really? I think the answer is no. Features are fine, but the GNU method seems to be include everything, and that's stupid. I don't need 96kb worth of ls. I just want to know what files are in a directory. The other half of the problem is that you've got GNU coreutils on one end, which are freaking huge, and then you've got busybox on the other end, which is one binary and a ton of aliases. A good start to a lightweight coreutils package would be breaking the busybox utils apart into descrete programs, in my opinion. What's wrong with the busybox approach? busybox used to support a build option which compiles every applet to it's own binary optionaly dynamically linked against libbb for space reasons. Don't know if it is still supported though. I agree with the rest of your mail. Marc -- Marc Andre Tanner http://www.brain-dump.org/ GPG key: CF7D56C0
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:07:42PM +0200, Preben Randhol wrote: On Fri, 15 May 2009 17:06:45 +0200 pancake panc...@youterm.com wrote: Actually i'm happy with arch linux, but, i really miss a non-gnu linux and minimalistic distribution. We should get a look on alternatives for glibc (google one? uclibc? ..) but maybe the biggest rock we will face it will be the X server...this is probably one of the interesting projects to work on, but without keeping the X compatibility. Any reason why you need a non-gnu distro? I don't see how that would make things suckless. I would wish for a perl-free world, but it would probably not happen any time soon. Building a recent Linux kernel actually requires perl and at some point they even considered rewriting the whole or at least a large part of the build system in perl. Don't know what they decided in the end. Marc -- Marc Andre Tanner http://www.brain-dump.org/ GPG key: CF7D56C0
Re: [dwm] musca wm
2009/5/15 pancake panc...@youterm.com: another tiling manager with interesting features: http://aerosuidae.net/musca.html Looks to me it's aiming the original WMI without tabbing a little bit. I definately prefer the dwm way after all ;) Kind regards, Anselm
Re: [dwm] musca wm
it's interesting. But I prefer dwm or wmii. On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Anselm R Garbe garb...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/15 pancake panc...@youterm.com: another tiling manager with interesting features: http://aerosuidae.net/musca.html Looks to me it's aiming the original WMI without tabbing a little bit. I definately prefer the dwm way after all ;) Kind regards, Anselm
Re: [dwm] musca wm
What I find interesting is the support for multi-screen. Actually I'm using wmii at work, because dwm cannot properly handle multiscreen layouts and this made me use the mouse too much. Wmii has some bugs, but at least is IMHO better for multiscreen layouts. I think this is the eternal discussion, because it is hard to find the 'best' approach to this problem for dwm. But for single-screen environments dwm still rocks :) I really miss the conceptual experimentation that dwm was in the past. But I agree that we should probably focus on other topics like 'st' or a full OS based on minimalist software (based on Linux without GNU craps) ... What do you think about creating an offtopic mailing list in suckless for discussing such kind of topics, instead of using the dwm@ one like nowadays happen. --pancake Benjamin Conner wrote: it's interesting. But I prefer dwm or wmii. On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 8:00 AM, Anselm R Garbe garb...@gmail.com mailto:garb...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/15 pancake panc...@youterm.com mailto:panc...@youterm.com: another tiling manager with interesting features: http://aerosuidae.net/musca.html Looks to me it's aiming the original WMI without tabbing a little bit. I definately prefer the dwm way after all ;) Kind regards, Anselm
Re: [dwm] musca wm
2009/5/15 pancake panc...@youterm.com: What I find interesting is the support for multi-screen. Actually I'm using wmii at work, because dwm cannot properly handle multiscreen layouts and this made me use the mouse too much. Wmii has some bugs, but at least is IMHO better for multiscreen layouts. I think this is the eternal discussion, because it is hard to find the 'best' approach to this problem for dwm. But for single-screen environments dwm still rocks :) I really miss the conceptual experimentation that dwm was in the past. But I agree that we should probably focus on other topics like 'st' or a full OS based on minimalist software (based on Linux without GNU craps) ... I'll provide a new multiscreen support this weekend in dwm. It's based on assigning specific tags to specific screens. What do you think about creating an offtopic mailing list in suckless for discussing such kind of topics, instead of using the dwm@ one like nowadays happen. I think it's been the charme of dwm@ to discuss lot's of other things, so I'd rather keep it as it is for now ;) Kind regards, Anselm
RE: [dwm] musca wm
2009/5/15 Anselm R Garbe garb...@gmail.com : I'll provide a new multiscreen support this weekend in dwm. It's based on assigning specific tags to specific screens. I really like the idea La información del presente documento es clasificada como Confidencial.
Re: [dwm] musca wm
What do you think about creating an offtopic mailing list in suckless for discussing such kind of topics, instead of using the dwm@ one like nowadays happen. I agree with Anselm. I like a lot of your ideas in that message. I really miss the conceptual experimentation that dwm was in the past. But I agree that we should probably focus on other topics like 'st' or a full OS based on minimalist software (based on Linux without GNU craps) ... That's a good idea. Maybe do an lfs. I'd use wmii as the Wm, so you don't have to recompile. Or maybe have no WM and just X so that you can put one in yourself and customize it. IDK. On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Leandro Chescotta lchesco...@banelco.com.ar wrote: 2009/5/15 Anselm R Garbe garb...@gmail.com : I'll provide a new multiscreen support this weekend in dwm. It's based on assigning specific tags to specific screens. I really like the idea La información del presente documento es clasificada como Confidencial.
Re: [dwm] musca wm
A friend of me is writing a pkgsystem that builds everything inside a chroot and allows to create a full usable distribution, the pkgsystem itself is not yet finished, but is pretty fast , written in C and shellscript and I really think it is a good project. But actually it is a single-man project. We can use this project as a tool to build the base system. http://repo.or.cz/w/xbps.git/ Actually i'm happy with arch linux, but, i really miss a non-gnu linux and minimalistic distribution. We should get a look on alternatives for glibc (google one? uclibc? ..) but maybe the biggest rock we will face it will be the X server...this is probably one of the interesting projects to work on, but without keeping the X compatibility. (just as an emulation layer) X11 is bloat. (as we have already discussed, we can reuse the drivers of xorg) but designing a better and simpler API. But this is probably a long topic to talk about, and we're of course not the first ones to claim for an X11 replacement. --pancake Benjamin Conner wrote: What do you think about creating an offtopic mailing list in suckless for discussing such kind of topics, instead of using the dwm@ one like nowadays happen. I agree with Anselm. I like a lot of your ideas in that message. I really miss the conceptual experimentation that dwm was in the past. But I agree that we should probably focus on other topics like 'st' or a full OS based on minimalist software (based on Linux without GNU craps) ... That's a good idea. Maybe do an lfs. I'd use wmii as the Wm, so you don't have to recompile. Or maybe have no WM and just X so that you can put one in yourself and customize it. IDK. On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Leandro Chescotta lchesco...@banelco.com.ar mailto:lchesco...@banelco.com.ar wrote: 2009/5/15 Anselm R Garbe garb...@gmail.com mailto:garb...@gmail.com : I'll provide a new multiscreen support this weekend in dwm. It's based on assigning specific tags to specific screens. I really like the idea La información del presente documento es clasificada como Confidencial.
RE: [dwm] musca wm
I see some time ago that there is a framebuffer option like X as I recall, maybe im confuse and didn't understand what that where, but I think it even has 3d acceleration, im at work without internet connection, but maybe someone can tell me what that is, I think it was fbsomething -Mensaje original- De: pancake [mailto:panc...@youterm.com] Enviado el: viernes, 15 de mayo de 2009 12:07 p.m. Para: dwm mail list Asunto: Re: [dwm] musca wm A friend of me is writing a pkgsystem that builds everything inside a chroot and allows to create a full usable distribution, the pkgsystem itself is not yet finished, but is pretty fast , written in C and shellscript and I really think it is a good project. But actually it is a single-man project. We can use this project as a tool to build the base system. http://repo.or.cz/w/xbps.git/ Actually i'm happy with arch linux, but, i really miss a non-gnu linux and minimalistic distribution. We should get a look on alternatives for glibc (google one? uclibc? ..) but maybe the biggest rock we will face it will be the X server...this is probably one of the interesting projects to work on, but without keeping the X compatibility. (just as an emulation layer) X11 is bloat. (as we have already discussed, we can reuse the drivers of xorg) but designing a better and simpler API. But this is probably a long topic to talk about, and we're of course not the first ones to claim for an X11 replacement. --pancake Benjamin Conner wrote: What do you think about creating an offtopic mailing list in suckless for discussing such kind of topics, instead of using the dwm@ one like nowadays happen. I agree with Anselm. I like a lot of your ideas in that message. I really miss the conceptual experimentation that dwm was in the past. But I agree that we should probably focus on other topics like 'st' or a full OS based on minimalist software (based on Linux without GNU craps) ... That's a good idea. Maybe do an lfs. I'd use wmii as the Wm, so you don't have to recompile. Or maybe have no WM and just X so that you can put one in yourself and customize it. IDK. On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 9:57 AM, Leandro Chescotta lchesco...@banelco.com.ar mailto:lchesco...@banelco.com.ar wrote: 2009/5/15 Anselm R Garbe garb...@gmail.com mailto:garb...@gmail.com : I'll provide a new multiscreen support this weekend in dwm. It's based on assigning specific tags to specific screens. I really like the idea La información del presente documento es clasificada como Confidencial. La información del presente documento es clasificada como Confidencial.
Re: [dwm] musca wm
2009/5/15 pancake panc...@youterm.com: A friend of me is writing a pkgsystem that builds everything inside a chroot and allows to create a full usable distribution, the pkgsystem itself is not yet finished, but is pretty fast , written in C and shellscript and I really think it is a good project. But actually it is a single-man project. We can use this project as a tool to build the base system. http://repo.or.cz/w/xbps.git/ Actually i'm happy with arch linux, but, i really miss a non-gnu linux and minimalistic distribution. We should get a look on alternatives for glibc (google one? uclibc? ..) but maybe the biggest rock we will face it will be the X server...this is probably one of the interesting projects to work on, but without keeping the X compatibility. (just as an emulation layer) X11 is bloat. (as we have already discussed, we can reuse the drivers of xorg) but designing a better and simpler API. But this is probably a long topic to talk about, and we're of course not the first ones to claim for an X11 replacement. --pancake I'd like to agree with you, and I would be glad to help in such an effort, but it would not give me any real benefit. There is a suckless alternative to GNU: Plan9. If I still run (arch)linux is because I often need things like a full featured web browser, pdflatex, the gimp, or ardour, for example, so I will need all the gnu-x-crap anyway. The same thing happens with that pkgsystem: it looks good, but what I really need from a pkgsystem is pre-packaged software, IMO compatibility with pacman (or any other widely used pm) would be better. But if you - or anybody else - go for it, every iniciative to remove GNU from the world has my vote. I have also listened good things about http://www.tinycorelinux.com, but have not tried the real thing myself. -- - yiyus || JGL .
RE: [dwm] musca wm
2009/5/15 yy yiyu@gmail.com : There is a suckless alternative to GNU: Plan9. I don't know that, there are apps under Plan9 like GNU? Why make it suckless comparative to GNU? every initiative to remove GNU from the world has my vote. I have also listened good things about http://www.tinycorelinux.com, but have not tried the real thing myself. Why you don't like GNU? I only ask because I don't know, I only want to know what's wrong with it, I only use it, and thinked it was great, I mean, I love open source software, but I really don't know the license thing La información del presente documento es clasificada como Confidencial.
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 05:38:51PM +0200, yy wrote: effort, but it would not give me any real benefit. There is a suckless alternative to GNU: Plan9. If I still run (arch)linux is because I often need things like a full featured web browser, pdflatex, the How about Glendix? Our ultimate goal is to create a minimalist Linux distribution that contains a Plan 9 userspace, instead of the GNU software that is usually provided by most distributions. http://www.glendix.org/ pgpsYkYSGdDaJ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [dwm] musca wm
+1 :D nilp wrote: On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 05:38:51PM +0200, yy wrote: effort, but it would not give me any real benefit. There is a suckless alternative to GNU: Plan9. If I still run (arch)linux is because I often need things like a full featured web browser, pdflatex, the How about Glendix? Our ultimate goal is to create a minimalist Linux distribution that contains a Plan 9 userspace, instead of the GNU software that is usually provided by most distributions. http://www.glendix.org/
Re: [dwm] musca wm
I hate X. One of my frineds is doing a thing and seeing how long he can go without X, just on the command line. So far, it's gone good. Though you'll need some X alternitive. On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 12:14 PM, pancake panc...@youterm.com wrote: +1 :D nilp wrote: On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 05:38:51PM +0200, yy wrote: effort, but it would not give me any real benefit. There is a suckless alternative to GNU: Plan9. If I still run (arch)linux is because I often need things like a full featured web browser, pdflatex, the How about Glendix? Our ultimate goal is to create a minimalist Linux distribution that contains a Plan 9 userspace, instead of the GNU software that is usually provided by most distributions. http://www.glendix.org/
Re: [dwm] musca wm
2009/5/15 Leandro Chescotta lchesco...@banelco.com.ar: 2009/5/15 yy yiyu@gmail.com : There is a suckless alternative to GNU: Plan9. I don't know that, there are apps under Plan9 like GNU? Why make it suckless comparative to GNU? In the sense that GNU aims to be a similar to UNIX operating system, but not UNIX, it is almost the same thing than Plan9. But now I was talking about glibc and the GNU tools, you could read http://harmful.cat-v.org/cat-v/ to get the idea, or some info pages. every initiative to remove GNU from the world has my vote. I have also listened good things about http://www.tinycorelinux.com, but have not tried the real thing myself. Why you don't like GNU? I only ask because I don't know, I only want to know what's wrong with it, I only use it, and thinked it was great, I mean, I love open source software, but I really don't know the license thing I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary, glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I don't like rms. -- - yiyus || JGL .
Re: [dwm] musca wm
I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary, glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I don't like rms. i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have features (imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic hackjobs. Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that make it comfortable is mad. Would you use dash instead of zsh as an everyday shell? At a risk of being boring, I'll say that the same argument can be made about text editors: VIM is quite bloated and big, but it's better than any small text editor; because text editing is one of those typical tasks that cannot be comfortable without a million features that are in no way related to each other. Even if someone writes a really small, elegant, suckless editor core, it will be unusable until: - it gets encoding handling right (internal, file, terminal) - word wrapping (disabled, enabled, soft, hard...) - syntax highlighting and autoindent, for C, Python, Lisp... - all possible tab behaviors (soft, hard, half,...) - autocompletion, ctags integration These are just the absolutely necessary basics, and if you implement these, you already have a multi-ten-thousand line application. Sucklessness goes through the window. (Yes, there are people who make do with mcedit, but.. come on.) I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of this would require adding of this bloat everyone hates so much. Best regards, Mate PS. am not trolling :)
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Fri, 15 May 2009, Mate Nagy wrote: Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that make it comfortable is mad. I was just about to write the exact same thing. However, coreutils could likely use some love to cut down on functionality duplicated across binaries, not to mention some extraneous options which few people ever use. In my opinion, it's about finding the balance between simplicity (so that people can hold the entire model of a command/utility in their head) and features (to allow users to achieve something without spending all of their time trying to fill in the gaps with awk.) I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of this would require adding of this bloat everyone hates so much. Exactly. dwm was largely well-adopted initially because there were no alternatives for dynamically managing windows. Since then, awesome and xmonad have largely poached the people looking for features and extensibility, while dwm has remained the ideal minimal core to play with and experiment on. People advocating for the recreation of cut-down versions of things just to be suckless fail to see that these will suck just as much, only there will be fewer useful _and_ extraneous features. Take it from me: I hate Wirth's Law, and I try to implement minimal, well-specified utilities myself, but I try to do this in a way which _improves_ on existing models instead of wasting my time duplicating existing efforts. Brendan MacDonell
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Fri, 15 May 2009 20:29:11 +0200 Mate Nagy mn...@port70.net wrote: I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary, glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I don't like rms. i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have features (imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic hackjobs. Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that make it comfortable is mad. Would you use dash instead of zsh as an everyday shell? At a risk of being boring, I'll say that the same argument can be made about text editors: VIM is quite bloated and big, but it's better than any small text editor; because text editing is one of those typical tasks that cannot be comfortable without a million features that are in no way related to each other. Even if someone writes a really small, elegant, suckless editor core, it will be unusable until: - it gets encoding handling right (internal, file, terminal) - word wrapping (disabled, enabled, soft, hard...) - syntax highlighting and autoindent, for C, Python, Lisp... - all possible tab behaviors (soft, hard, half,...) - autocompletion, ctags integration These are just the absolutely necessary basics, and if you implement these, you already have a multi-ten-thousand line application. Sucklessness goes through the window. (Yes, there are people who make do with mcedit, but.. come on.) I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of this would require adding of this bloat everyone hates so much. Best regards, Mate PS. am not trolling :) That't what I wanted to say. :D
Re: [dwm] musca wm
From Bash and readline man page (bugs section): It's too big and too slow. I think this bug is the perfect definition of GNU/FSF style. Have you seen a piece of software that is small, efficient and easy to read and in each new version it become clumsy, slow and bloated? On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:11 PM, Preben Randhol rand...@pvv.org wrote: On Fri, 15 May 2009 20:29:11 +0200 Mate Nagy mn...@port70.net wrote: I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary, glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I don't like rms. i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have features (imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic hackjobs. Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that make it comfortable is mad. Would you use dash instead of zsh as an everyday shell? At a risk of being boring, I'll say that the same argument can be made about text editors: VIM is quite bloated and big, but it's better than any small text editor; because text editing is one of those typical tasks that cannot be comfortable without a million features that are in no way related to each other. Even if someone writes a really small, elegant, suckless editor core, it will be unusable until: - it gets encoding handling right (internal, file, terminal) - word wrapping (disabled, enabled, soft, hard...) - syntax highlighting and autoindent, for C, Python, Lisp... - all possible tab behaviors (soft, hard, half,...) - autocompletion, ctags integration These are just the absolutely necessary basics, and if you implement these, you already have a multi-ten-thousand line application. Sucklessness goes through the window. (Yes, there are people who make do with mcedit, but.. come on.) I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of this would require adding of this bloat everyone hates so much. Best regards, Mate PS. am not trolling :) I couldn't agree with you more! -- Preben Randhol http://wee-free-lore.blogspot.com/
Re: [dwm] musca wm
Have you seen a piece of software that is small, efficient and easy to read and in each new version it become clumsy, slow and bloated? Ubuntu. Worse eatch relese. (sp sp) On 5/15/09, pmarin pacog...@gmail.com wrote: From Bash and readline man page (bugs section): It's too big and too slow. I think this bug is the perfect definition of GNU/FSF style. Have you seen a piece of software that is small, efficient and easy to read and in each new version it become clumsy, slow and bloated? On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:11 PM, Preben Randhol rand...@pvv.org wrote: On Fri, 15 May 2009 20:29:11 +0200 Mate Nagy mn...@port70.net wrote: I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary, glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I don't like rms. i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have features (imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic hackjobs. Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that make it comfortable is mad. Would you use dash instead of zsh as an everyday shell? At a risk of being boring, I'll say that the same argument can be made about text editors: VIM is quite bloated and big, but it's better than any small text editor; because text editing is one of those typical tasks that cannot be comfortable without a million features that are in no way related to each other. Even if someone writes a really small, elegant, suckless editor core, it will be unusable until: - it gets encoding handling right (internal, file, terminal) - word wrapping (disabled, enabled, soft, hard...) - syntax highlighting and autoindent, for C, Python, Lisp... - all possible tab behaviors (soft, hard, half,...) - autocompletion, ctags integration These are just the absolutely necessary basics, and if you implement these, you already have a multi-ten-thousand line application. Sucklessness goes through the window. (Yes, there are people who make do with mcedit, but.. come on.) I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of this would require adding of this bloat everyone hates so much. Best regards, Mate PS. am not trolling :) I couldn't agree with you more! -- Preben Randhol http://wee-free-lore.blogspot.com/
Re: [dwm] musca wm
Quite true, but the last time I installed FreeBSD or Plan9 on my laptop I could barely have the mousepad working... On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 12:23 AM, Benjamin Conner tommydabo...@gmail.comwrote: Have you seen a piece of software that is small, efficient and easy to read and in each new version it become clumsy, slow and bloated? Ubuntu. Worse eatch relese. (sp sp) On 5/15/09, pmarin pacog...@gmail.com wrote: From Bash and readline man page (bugs section): It's too big and too slow. I think this bug is the perfect definition of GNU/FSF style. Have you seen a piece of software that is small, efficient and easy to read and in each new version it become clumsy, slow and bloated? On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 11:11 PM, Preben Randhol rand...@pvv.org wrote: On Fri, 15 May 2009 20:29:11 +0200 Mate Nagy mn...@port70.net wrote: I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary, glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I don't like rms. i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have features (imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic hackjobs. Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that make it comfortable is mad. Would you use dash instead of zsh as an everyday shell? At a risk of being boring, I'll say that the same argument can be made about text editors: VIM is quite bloated and big, but it's better than any small text editor; because text editing is one of those typical tasks that cannot be comfortable without a million features that are in no way related to each other. Even if someone writes a really small, elegant, suckless editor core, it will be unusable until: - it gets encoding handling right (internal, file, terminal) - word wrapping (disabled, enabled, soft, hard...) - syntax highlighting and autoindent, for C, Python, Lisp... - all possible tab behaviors (soft, hard, half,...) - autocompletion, ctags integration These are just the absolutely necessary basics, and if you implement these, you already have a multi-ten-thousand line application. Sucklessness goes through the window. (Yes, there are people who make do with mcedit, but.. come on.) I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of this would require adding of this bloat everyone hates so much. Best regards, Mate PS. am not trolling :) I couldn't agree with you more! -- Preben Randhol http://wee-free-lore.blogspot.com/
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On May 15, 2009, at 10:56 PM, Preben Randhol rand...@pvv.org wrote: On Fri, 15 May 2009 15:42:24 +0200 pancake panc...@youterm.com wrote: I really miss the conceptual experimentation that dwm was in the past. But I agree that we should probably focus on other topics like 'st' or a full OS based on minimalist software (based on Linux without GNU craps) ... Please, make a C, C++ etc.. compiler then. Tinycc is live again. You should check it. What do you think about creating an offtopic mailing list in suckless for discussing such kind of topics, instead of using the dwm@ one like nowadays happen. I like that the list is open to somewhat off topic discussions. Sometimes they lead to a less suckless life for people in that they solve problems for people :-) Yep me too :) Btw what about a minimal mua? Would be nice to build a database of minimal software and try to classify it and comment about it. This way we can get a list of the things 'we' have, and the ones missing. The wiki can be a good place, but maybe we should think on a new page ??.suckless.org
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On May 15, 2009, at 11:07 PM, Preben Randhol rand...@pvv.org wrote: On Fri, 15 May 2009 17:06:45 +0200 pancake panc...@youterm.com wrote: Actually i'm happy with arch linux, but, i really miss a non-gnu linux and minimalistic distribution. We should get a look on alternatives for glibc (google one? uclibc? ..) but maybe the biggest rock we will face it will be the X server...this is probably one of the interesting projects to work on, but without keeping the X compatibility. Any reason why you need a non-gnu distro? I don't see how that would make things suckless. I would wish for a perl-free world, but it would probably not happen any time soon. Gnu software is bloated by definition. You only need to take the 'true' program. Just type strings /bin/true :) I like perl but I agree but it is big for most of uses, but is fast and powerful. I would prefer to use nqp or miniperl which are minimal versions of p5 and p6 compiled at build time to compile itself and do some processing stuff that makes the build process more handful and controllable than using make. It is a huge sw, but miniperl is cool :) About busybox.. The reason to be a single binary with aliases is to memory usage. The problem maybe is that it ships program we will probably not use, but it is something to be ignorable on current hw. If you ever tried to build glibc,gdb,gcc,binutils... You will understand what I want a minimal distro. About vim, I like it but I really think that lot of features like screen handling, colors, ctags, should be external. Pipes are powerful, and speed can be pretty good if the core is smart enought. Using a prefork or similar technique done by apache f.ex can really accelerate such tasks, so a minimal vi editor with nice features can be really achieved by delegating all such features to external apps or libraries Anyway, it is easy to say that something is bloat, but when you cannot dictate the development of hardware, don't expect things not to be complicated. Suckless hardware will be the next step :P I find rewriting existing software to make it smaller is seldomly a productive way. Invent something different and novel in stead. What minimalistic sw offers to me is new point of view, because it is based on constant refactoring and brainstorming. We need new things, that's true, but we also need to build them on top of a decent base system. Or at least is what I think. And I know that it is not an easy task, but we are enought people to organize or discuss such kind of projects.
Re: [dwm] musca wm
On Fri 15 May 2009 at 16:08:07 PDT pancake wrote: On May 15, 2009, at 10:56 PM, Preben Randhol rand...@pvv.org wrote: On Fri, 15 May 2009 15:42:24 +0200 pancake panc...@youterm.com wrote: I really miss the conceptual experimentation that dwm was in the past. But I agree that we should probably focus on other topics like 'st' or a full OS based on minimalist software (based on Linux without GNU craps) ... Please, make a C, C++ etc.. compiler then. Tinycc is live again. You should check it. And last I heard, the work to update pcc is still underway. Another candidate to replace gcc is llvm/clang. What do you think about creating an offtopic mailing list in suckless for discussing such kind of topics, instead of using the dwm@ one like nowadays happen. I like that the list is open to somewhat off topic discussions. Sometimes they lead to a less suckless life for people in that they solve problems for people :-) Yep me too :) Btw what about a minimal mua? Would be nice to build a database of minimal software and try to classify it and comment about it. This way we can get a list of the things 'we' have, and the ones missing. The wiki can be a good place, but maybe we should think on a new page ??.suckless.org I'd also like to see a more detailed and precise statement of what counts as minimal or suckless software. SLOC doesn't seem to say everything that needs to be said. Is it only the code or executable size, or is also a requirement for spartan elegance in the user interface? Can we describe what we mean by that kind of elegance?
