I use Windows btw
this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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Those definitions of pacman's flags sounds correct to me, at least when I correlate them to my (admittedly rough) memory of using them in the past. I generally ended up using
yayfor handling both Arch and AUR package management, but I did most of my package searching via DDG's!archand!aur"bangs" to look at it on the web (or justyay likely-the-package-name) which explains my lapse in the Q/s flags.I won't pretend like I've seen every possible API out there, but the only time that I personally know the use of magic numbers made sense from a developer standpoint was in Linux's reboot system call which this question/answer does a good job of explaining the reasoning behind it but the quick rundown is that its a safety feature; A bit-flip could inadvertently trigger the reboot system call to be ran instead of something like say
exec()which you definitely wouldn't want to have done on your PC while you're working (or even worse, something like a web server) . The magic numbers are required for the reboot system call to eliminate this possibility because its practically impossible to inadvertently pass in the exact correct numbers for the reboot syscall to another one in the same way that its unlikely you'd accidentally unlock the guard to a fire alarm and pull the trigger by just brushing up against it.(Okay, maybe that rundown wasn't quicker than the answer on stack-exchange... oops)
I suspect any other use cases for magic numbers are very similar to this (a safety precaution against accidentally calling a destructive API) or some silly (and weak) "security through obscurity" type of principal. Somehow I doubt the "magic arguments" for pacman are for either though 😅
Oh yes for sure, computers are quite the double edged sword - vastly handy and important tools but also a royal pain in the ass way too often...
That makes sense about the magic numbers! Though I suspect that that isn't the case for pacman's commands. This might be totally false but Arch is designed with simplicity and elegance in mind, and so short single letter commands to manage your entire system is preferred.
Just out of curiosity, are you a developer or sysadmin?
Somewhat both! Most of my background is software development, but I always felt it was important to have decent sysadmin skills so that I'd be able to fully understand the requirements of something that I could be in charge of developing (or at least, helping develop).
This idea was further cemented when I started hearing more and more cases of professional sysadmins having a disdain for developers not understanding things like DNS. And to be fair, I think the reverse is important too - that sysadmins should have at least some knowledge of the development world. At the end of the day, usually both roles have to coexist with each other in a symbiotic relationship of sorts or else it doesn't work. If you don't have people to make an application, then you have nothing to deploy - but if you have no one to deploy and maintain the environment an application runs in, there's no point in creating it. It makes me sad to see that even to this day there still tends to be an "us vs them" mentality from both sides, but I guess that's just humanity in general...
Funnily enough, at my current job my roles are the opposite - I primarily do a lot of system administration, but every now and then I do some of the development at my job as well.
It worked out though, because it got me more into the sysadmin side of things and I try to strengthen my knowledge of systems administration even in my personal time - that's one of the reasons why I'm hosting the instance I'm commenting from 😁
Probably a longer answer than you were looking for, but there you have it!
Ah I see! So you were/are both, that's why you can understand both perspectives. I see, you're your instance's host! Nah, thank you for sharing! I'm quite new to the free/open-source software and Linux world, and this meme sort of sums up my feelings about the different Linux distributions. I guess I'm still in that infatuation phase where I think of distros as cool and looking at new cool stuff and projects. I'm not a technical person, so this is a total noob's perspective.
To be honest, I don't think I ever left this phase ahaha. I've been using Linux for quite a while now, about 10ish years on and off (definitely more the "on" over the last 4 years) and I still find it really cool to switch distros whenever I find something that looks neat/different. Right now I'm trying out Fedora Kinoite (An "immutable" version of Fedora's KDE spin), but when the new "Orchid" release of Vanilla OS comes out I have a good feeling I'll be switching again to try that one out!
Well I think you're selling yourself short here (checkout imposter syndrome which is very common in the tech field), you could've certainly fooled me! You had a really solid explanation of pacman's arguments, and being able to explain them (rather than just memorizing "I use this combination in order to do X", if that makes sense) is part of what makes someone stand out as more of an intermediate level rather than a beginner level in my opinion!
Ah, the eternal distro hopping. I can relate. Frankly, I do think that Vanilla OS and even something like NixOS are genuinely exciting development in the world of Linux distributions. I'm unfamiliar with Fedora Kinoite, but skimming thorough its page, it looks really good! In general, I do like this side of things where Linux distributions tend to focus on being "universal" and "reliable", even if it means fundamentally pushing forward and away from the traditional this-distro-does-this-uniquely-and-manage-packages-like-this thing. I'm not super well versed in Vanilla OS but I did watch The Linux Experiment's video on it. I believe that it is immutable and installing packages through GNOME software defaults to the Flatpak format. Another thing is that you can create/launch containerised systems inside your OS, perhaps for developers or tinkerers who want to mess with different OSes.
NixOS on the other hand, well I think it's a package manager as well as a distro (?), and it basically builds packages in containers or in isolation of some sort. I do like this philosophy of containerising things to manage them by themselves individually (I think? sorta like Flatpak?), and NixOS also makes it immediately reproducible by its declarative system management. I think this sort of development is really good since it is a battle against the naturally occurring fragmentation in the Linux environment. Perhaps, there will be less "apt snap pacman yay zypper dnf yum emerge etc", since the method of having unique repos for each distro can be a bit annoying and time-consuming for the overall Linux and open-source ecosystem, though I think it's okay for the most part. Making the fundamental design and maintenance of the systems and packages modular is really great, since we'll have better hardware and software in the future. It is pretty exciting, for me at least.
Haha I'm flattered, thank you! I promise you I absolutely suck at all in these things, I just have some really minor interest in *-nix stuff. I'm not in the tech field (at least not right now), I'm just a postgraduate student studying solar cells. I used MX Linux for about a year during my final year of bachelor's degree, and right now I'm toying around with Arch. I'm that new kid interested in Linux, you know? I think in general I'm more interested in the free / open-source software (FOSS) world. Throughout several years, I played around with Ubuntu/Lubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, even tried FreeBSD, and experimented just a tad bit with Alpine. Read about UNIX, GNU, Linux, FOSS stuff, and then OS, software, programming, web, technology stuff. Then I just have my own setup using almost entirely FOSS for personal use (mostly browsing, writing, learning programming, and some light retro gaming for leisure), and also for academic work (LaTeX, Zotero, Taguette, just a little bit of Python). I'm also using Vim. Again, I'm that excited kid, ya know? Anyway, I'm just a science student, but only now getting quite interested in Linux, computers and software in general. No experience in the tech field at all. Thank you though!
NixOS is really cool! I've actually tried it out a couple of times, and I find the premise of a completely reproducible system to be incredibly intriguing. In the time that I've tried it, I've found that it strays a bit too close to the "The way this system is designed is getting in the way of the things I want or need to do with my PC" - but it will up there on the distros to circle back to every now and then to see if things change.
You're correct that Nix is a few different things, it's a language (the Nix language), a package manager (Nix as a package manager), and then finally a distro as well (NixOS) - when running NixOS you get the benefits of all of them wrapped up in a convenient package so that your whole system can be managed in a declarative way (even down to your home folder / "dot files" if you use Home Manager - which technically also works outside of NixOS too).
Your knowledge of the FOSS world is stellar, even if you're not in the tech field - keep up the great work because I can tell you've got some wonderful adventures ahead of you!
I see, that's what Nix is! Interesting. Perhaps someday it can change and improve until it becomes a seriously viable distro for most people. It'll be a sight to see.
Hey thanks man, I appreciate it! Thanks for this conversation too! Hopefully we can have more conversations like this in the future. 😄