I would be interested to know what people think about http://voidlinux.eu

Since Arch uses systemd and I am getting tired of systemd growing like a virus in my OS, I have decided I want to move to Void.

All of the main features of the frontpage speak to me and a test install in a VM did work wonderfully and was done within 15 minutes.

So, what is your opinion?

Looks quite interesting, but i'm not as quick as i used to be with the distro-hopping.... Especially this

Quote:Void's package manager and build system have been written from scratch.

is something i have mixed feelings about. These things have been implemented time and time agian - why not re-use something existing, fork and adapt?

I used it for about 6 months, had no real problems with it until I started trying to write packages. It's not *difficult*, but it's nowhere near as easy as writing them for CRUX. Having a functioning musl-based version is cool too. runit is cool and easy to use as well. I'd say go for it if you want, just be aware that you won't have as many packages at the ready as you would on Arch, although all the essentials were there for me.

mrtn, his logic at the time of writing the package manager was as a learning experience. The why is simple, but since then it's come to stand on its own amongst, and certainly at very least compete with any other manager out there.

I will install it next week after I buy a new laptop.

Maybe I'll install it with Arch in dual boot since I maintain some packages there and also I want to try the musl version for Void. That's another reason to have Arch for safe working alternative.

Btw, in Arch I use busybox init. But maybe I'll migrate to the Toybox one.

It looks like there are at least two very capable individuals working on it, Gottox and chneukirchen (https://github.com/gottox, https://github.com/chneukirchen). They both have affiliations with the suckless project.

A friend of mine used Void Linux for a while and was quite happy about it. He liked runit although he didn't really know what to
use it for.

I believe a new package manager is not always a bad idea, I think people should give Void a try.

The installer is kinda meh,- it's a console script with Dialog as GUI, I rather prefer a manuall install like Arch. (I will go this away actually and read the installer and what it does)

(27-10-2016, 05:19 AM)mrtn Wrote: is something i have mixed feelings about. These things have been implemented time and time agian - why not re-use something existing, fork and adapt?

Because it's it's freaking fuuuuuun!!!!
Note that XBPS is extremely close in design to pacman. It's mostly just pacman splitted into multiple binaries (as I see it).

For runit, I definitely love the design, but have mixed feelings regarding implementation. It clutters the output of process listing commands by spawning at least 3 processes per service. Extremely verbose, so it doesn't help troubleshooting issue, and elevates to a power of 3 the number of crash that could shut your services down.
It is relatively easy to setup regardless, and is pretty modular.

As for musl, it's a good thing they switched to it, but doing that comes with its fair share of "problems", for example, gcc is stuck in version 4 (at least, it doesn't require C++ crap to compile!).

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From my experience, Void linux is a cool distro, that stands out from others (runit + musl), with an OK package manager (too many binaries, if you ask me though, but that's why we got aliases), and a "funny" package building system. I couldn't get around it though, it's way too complex for me to setup, and the abstraction level in package recipes is just too high. Back in the days I've been unable to package my own version of 2bwm (eg, providing my own config.h, or using a custom URL).

I've also found the lead dev to be pretty harsh with newcomers, and not welcoming at all ("You don't like it?! go fucking make it yourself and leave me alone!", that's not the exact terms, but you get the idea)

@z3bra: Huh? It doesnt look too hard:
https://github.com/voidlinux/void-packag...m/template

I think the pre_build function is used just for this!

I currently run void on my laptop and as an in-home server. I thoroughly enjoy xbps, simply for its speed. I dont mind the different commands to perform certain tasks. Much of the commands on nix are the same way, so I don't mind the package manager being that way. I also like its minimalistic approach and running the musl build is also pretty cool.

Tried it myself. The init scripts are great, and so is XBPS. The speed of both is outstanding.

(28-10-2016, 01:31 PM)z3bra Wrote: For runit, I definitely love the design, but have mixed feelings regarding implementation. It clutters the output of process listing commands by spawning at least 3 processes per service. Extremely verbose, so it doesn't help troubleshooting issue, and elevates to a power of 3 the number of crash that could shut your services down.
It is relatively easy to setup regardless, and is pretty modular.

I definitely can back this up, though. runit could use some design improvements.

In what way could runit use design improvements?

Maybe we can get those improvements into the program.

@TheAnachron

It's not especially the recipe format that gave me troubles (though, as I said, I find that there is to much abstraction), it's the build environment as well. I hope things have improved since then, but back in the days (it was more than a year ago now), the build system was supposedly standalone, and self-bootstrappable. Except it was clunky. Creating the chroot was working, but it was failing to install the dependencies correctly, or had trouble linking them, once the package you just built was installed in the chroot, it failed at extracting it correctly, and so on. It was certainly partly my fault, as I was not good enough to do it on first try, but it was certainly missing some cohesion and sanity checks to ensure the builds were correct.

The idea remains nice though, building packages in a chroot to ensure all dependencies are listed is a nice idea.