OS Upgrades Powered By Git 92
JamieKitson writes "The latest Webconverger 15 release is the first Linux distribution to be automagically updatable from a Github repository. The chroot of the OS is kept natively in git's format and fuse mounted with git-fs. Webconverger fulfills the Web kiosk use case, using Firefox and competes indirectly with Google Chrome OS. Chrome OS also has an autoupdate feature, however not as powerful, unified & transparent as when simply using git."
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I still think it's a bit rude to describe Linus as a "git", though.
arg (Score:5, Insightful)
They describe it as "automagic", SO I HAVE NO #$%&*(*+&% INTEREST IN IT!
Ever! Arg!
Re:arg (Score:5, Funny)
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You're a missing close paren, oodaloop!
YOU'RE A MISSING CLOSE PAREN!!!
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)) fixed that for you.
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Thanks, I was already running low on stack space.
Re:arg (Score:5, Insightful)
It's designed for web kiosks, like the kind you see in libraries. It's not for power Linux users. It's for a "set-up-and-forget" installation where everything just works, and magically stays updated and patched.
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This could be for power users.
Just point your Git repository sources at Linus' personal nightly build!! This is the next, next step past Gentoo. Gentoo pioneered direct from source code distros. Now we can have developers check out that source we are booting from on a daily basis.
Now when Linus commits, it can be in production the next day! Real IT people run all their developing in PRODUCTION.
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--That's all fine, well and good - until you get a bug in the source code that "automagically" gets sent out to 10,000 endpoints and breaks everything.
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Using git (or any decent VCS) as the engine behind an updater system is incredibly smart and powerful. Roll your OS patches forward, backwards, merge customizations in or out, all very reliably, trackable, and managable. That isn't magic, it's just smart. A hell of a lot smarter then rolling one's own from scratch.
It always amazes me how often and fiercely the Linux crowd equates banging one's head against the wall with "understanding", "willingness to learn", "freedom", or most laughable of all, "power"
Re:arg (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that you are managing highly interdependent binary files (executable and libraries) which you can't merge in any useful way. With a large percentage of changes being security related so the goal is never to simply role back to previous versions.
Yes managing the dependencies that result form allowing people to choose different programs and libraries and even the versions they prefer is an incredibly difficult task. Lucky the are several brilliant systems already available.
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I would tend to suspect that(unless you have very competent admins who actually screen the incoming updates in some way deeper than mere bug-checking, in which case you run your own damn update server and vet before anything gets sent out to the clients) the version control system would merely need to be not pathologically bad at handling binaries.
Yes, the binaries do change; but the trajectory of a production box is, most of the time: 1. Start 2. Update available. Apply? 3. Yes. 4. Goto 1. As long as Git i
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There wouldn't be anything stopping you; but you'd really have to hate handling binaries with git to respond by getting all Gentoo on the problem. Unless you have something specific in mind, compiling something exactly the same way that everybody else has already compiled it is a bit of a waste of time...
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git is a great tool, however it is extremely poorly suited for handling binary files in the way this project is using.
The CyanogenMod project recently encountered issues with getting locked out of some repos temporarily because they were simply too big and driving too much traffic - in almost all cases, the culprits were device trees that contained prebuilt kernel binaries instead of using the inline kernel building process that has been strongly encouraged for quite some time.
As a result of the most recent
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i agree that git is a great tool, especially when i do not have to use it; as Linus Torvalds put it [kernel.org], git stands for:
One specific use of git that i love, and where you never have to touch git at all, is SparkleShare [sparkleshare.org], granted that i self host it in a mini NAS
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You'd get a +1 if I had mod points - although I would assume Blymie takes offense at the word 'automagic' moreso than the process being... automagic ;-)
I guess it wouldn't be a half bad way to manage Gentoo's portage or FreeBSD's ports, but it doesn't seem like a smart idea for binaries - and I wonder if the bulk source (rather than the makefiles, patches and descriptors of a portage/ports system) would be manageable, assuming that most people would want to only download the source for the parts they need.
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But while they work damn well for end users in practice, they are work intensive for package maintaners. There ha
Re:arg (Score:5, Informative)
It always amazes me how often and fiercely the Linux crowd equates banging one's head against the wall with "understanding", "willingness to learn", "freedom", or most laughable of all, "power".
Odd, the only time I feel like banging my head agaisnt the wall is in Windows. It took months to figure out how to disable the retarded "tap to click" on my notebook. When I installed Linux on it it took five minutes. Windows had it in some icon at the bottom right of the screen you had to click to get to the icon where you could actually disable it, and it was buried half a dozen menus down, rather than being in the "mouse" function in Control Panel where it belonged. In Linux, it was in KDE's version of Control panel, in the mouse settings, three clicks and done.
It's bad ideas, half implemented, and hastily shipped off to the masses. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That's Windows, not Linux. Example: Vista, W8.
It's very rare to see solidly good ideas advanced in the Linux world
Rare? What solidly good ideas has MS ever come up with? OTOH in Linux I can set it up to boot to a default user and enter your user password for you (as long as it's not root). Why can't Windows do that? And not only am I logged onto the machine and network, all the apps and documents that were open when I shut it down are reopened. Why can't Windows do that? I can have movies as wallpaper, why can't Windows do that? Audacity lists lyrics of songs while they're played, downloaded from the internet. Why can't Windows Media Player do that?
Moronic "If it's not hard it's not good!"
Ah, I see... I was going to accuse you of shilling, but I'm pretty sure you're not, but tried some flavor of Linux (probably Red Hat or Debian) and couldn't find the C: drive. Your problem is your youth. Us geezers are used to unfamiliar operating systems; starting with BASIC, moviong up to DOS, then Windows... then Linux.
Linux is far easier to use than Windows and does far more, is more stable, faster, more secure... Windows can't hold a candle to it. But then, Microsoft is a single company and Linux is many different companies and private developers, far more than MS could afford to hire (because the stockholders would be up in arms).
Linux is Burger King: have it your way. Windows is McDonald's: you get it how we make it and you'll LIKE IT, serf!
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http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315231 [microsoft.com]
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Regedit is neither commandline nor third party.
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No, but editing the registry is a lot closer to a hack than modifying a text file. Joe Sixpack can't edit the registry, but he can easily set up his Linux computer to do it without any registry hacks*; it's a checkbox in kde.
* Linux has no registry.
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You make my point for me. Joe sixpack can edit the registry? In kde the choice is there on one of the install screens; you click a check box and that's it. No need to trawl forums to find a link to figure out how to do it. It's there, automatically.
A registry edit is a hack. If you have to hack your PC to make it functional, well... isn't that what MS shills continualy spew about Linux?
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Mostly I compare Linux against other Unix systems, not Windows. To which even the most modern distributions (the plethora of distributions being a large part of the problem itself) can't even stand up against most other Unix systems from over a decade ago. *BSD, Solaris, HPUX, Irix.
a.out vs ELF
libc vs glibc
VM of the week
Filesystem of the week
Package system of the week
Source management via an email Inbox of patch files, seriously?
KDE vs GNOME
Does audio work yet?
etc, etc, etc.
The point is Linux, at its very
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Experimentation is great, in a lab.
The Linux community (very much including Linus himself) makes the mistake of subjecting the entire user base to lab experiments. The community is a combination of bleeding edge lab experiments (mostly on the core OS side) and blatant copying (mostly on the GUI side).
So users get the best of both worlds: A half baked GUI cloned from Windows and Mac, running on top of an immature, unstable OS.
As to my experience, considering how much I get around I'm quite confident it is t
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"Uptime"...has a more pointless metric ever been created?
It's very, very difficult to crash any decently mature OS at this point, reguardless of load. This means "uptime" really means "unpatched time", because for most all systems it's most accurately a measure of how infrequently updates are applied or how diligent the admins are generally. Yes, most updates to most systems won't require a reboot...but a diligent admin will bounce them anyway in most cases...if only to be sure they still restart correctl
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Command-line is a user-interface.
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That is not the Linux way. To expect understanding and willingness to learn and giving freedom and power in return is. It is no accident that a command-line gives the power of command, while a user-interface merely lets you click on the colorful buttons.
Oh please if you'd bothered to read the very short snippet in the story summation, you'd see that this was for kiosk automation. Please don't ban WebConverger from the land of Linux for heresy.
I propose that Slashdot require a TL;DR for every story that is written in huge bold letters and displayed above every single response textbox.
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I even read TFA and wrote my posting afterwards. Maybe you should stop jumping to invalid conclusions?
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So you just plain missed the whole "this is for kiosks" part? Good reading comprehension skills there, Tex.
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Forgive me, I just assumed that you missed the part about this being for kiosk automation. I now realize that you just don't care about using Linux in any great capacity. Each Linux installation should be it's own delicate house of cards held together by deft handling and the force of gravity and friction. To use Linux for anything other than that goes against the "Linux way".
Oh, I assume you don't use any package management system to "automagically" install and maintain your software? Compiling from the so
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And a TL;DR for the TL;DR. And more until the final TL;DR is only one word.
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I agree. "automagic" is is one of the things that make Microsoft products suck so badly
I disagree, what makes MS products suck so badly is bad design and sloppy programming. What makes their "automagic" so bad is simply that it's poorly implimented.
LINUX DOES AUTOMAGIC BETTER!
Take my bluetooth dongle for example. For Windows, install the program and drivers with a bunch of clicks, UACs, and a reboot. In Linux? Plug in the dongle and it works. People who think Windows is user-friendly have never used any oth
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LINUX DOES AUTOMAGIC BETTER!
I see you never had an udev or PAM problem. True, it is still better than MS, because you can find documentation and you can access and debug everything and fix it yourself, but that is about it.
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Linux is neither perfect or even the best fit for everyone (artists need Macs, gamers need Windows). I'm just tired of MS fanbois and shills lying about it. And you are correct, I never ran across those problems.
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I won't be installing it on my desktop or servers any time soon, but it is an interresting experiment and maybe interresting to see what new ideas they've come up with.
Who knows maybe they came up with something interresting which could apply to servers.
Anyway, I'm gonna take a look.
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I won't be installing it on my desktop or servers any time soon,
I should hope not! Installing a browser kiosk on your desktop would be weird, and if you installed it on a server I might have to take away your keys to the server room.
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I have never liked the term "automagically". There's no need for it, because it is exactly the same as "automatically". Unless the user is somehow implying that magic is involved.
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Automagic appears in early BSD kernel source, it's not some flashy new-found marketing term, although maybe the bastards have tried to pinch it! :)
Yet Another... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet Another Update Manager.
Replacing one transport with another isn't innovative enough to warrant the attention. You could use torrents under YUM or APT, you could use GIT, SVN, or any of a number of change management tools as a means to tell the client which updates to subscribe to and install.
But I doubt any such approach will ever see critical mass, just because the two big players (Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/RHEL) already have perfectly usable tools. You'd need some serious whizz-bang new features to justify changing those tools, and the article doesn't suggest anything that can't be done already with existing technology.
Change for the sake of change is pointless; there has to be a benefit big enough to justify the change, and I don't see that in the write-up.
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Please write out the use-case for an auto-updating torrent system in 5 lines or less, because the git version is.
Git is not that clever, yet (Score:3)
Chrome OS also has an autoupdate feature, however not as powerful, unified & transparent as when simply using git.
"clever" differential updates usually work this way (Chrome browser uses it or used it back in the day):
And Git has can not do that yet, because it uses diff + deflate, having far less scope than, e.g. LZMA with 500MB dictionary (requiring 5GB of memory for compressing it is acceptable if it is done just once per version).
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Fedora 16/17 uses delta rpms by default when using yum
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Commits can be signed and verified ?
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Git has integrity checking built into it already, presuming you trust the source. The only way this can happen is if someone gets access to the git repository and commits malicious code. No project is safe from that case.
pardon my ignorance (Score:1)
Alright, so I guess they're using git to keep the binaries up to date, not syncing source and recompiling?
How is that better then using rsync or whatever to keep binaries up to date?
The Dam Tour. (Score:5, Funny)
My company is migrating to git for all of our versioning control. I got to be the person to fly to the UK and get everyone up to speed on it. I knew it was British slang but not the full connotation of such.
I think you Brits need to make the next generation versioning system and call it fucker/bastard just to get us back.
I couldn't imaging standing up in front of my managers manager. "Well yeah, we're moving to bastard next. Bastards not too hard to use. You just type 'bastard clone'...."
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The term "git" is not used in the USA? I didn't know that. I just assumed it had the same meaning over there but nobody cared. After all, there is GIMP.
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By the way GIT was developed by Linus Torvalds and he's Swedish, so it's not the USA we'd have to 'get back'.
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By the way GIT was developed by Linus Torvalds and he's Swedish, so it's not the USA we'd have to 'get back'.
He's Finnish, not Swedish.
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By the way GIT was developed by Linus Torvalds and he's Swedish, so it's not the USA we'd have to 'get back'.
He's Finnish, not Swedish.
Finnish, and of the minority there who speak Swedish.
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Where did I use the words "USA"? Or even say where I was from?
Get "us" non-British English speaking citizens of the world.
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Oh, OK, I must have assumed that. You're Swedish?
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Even if I was Git was written by a Finn.
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It's relatively tame -- one of the first "naughty words" I learned at school, I was probably about 6 years old. It belongs with words like crap, cock, dick, fanny (another UK/US confusion...), arse. The sexual words are all worse, including bastard.
The project manager on my project would giggle every time it was mentioned in a meeting when we were moving to it, about a year ago. I suggested he pronounced it "jit" instead, which was OK until we started using the "EGit" plugin for eclipse -- "eejit" is use
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Everyone fails to get the WTF :( (Score:3)
It's sad that no one picked up on the IMHO biggest snafu: the chroot is mounted using git-fs. Performance-wise it'll suck donkey balls just because of that. Just think of it: every page mapping for those executables has to go through userspace! Whoever thought of that was a real whiz, sigh.
If I were serious about it, I'd work on getting gitfs implemented natively in the kernel. Using fuse could be a proof-of-concept while the kernel driver is being implemented. I just hope that git stores its database with files still being files, because at least then the kernel driver could be, pretty much a filter driver that only rewrites file paths. Otherwise it'll have to be a full-blown filesystem driver with all the inefficiencies of using what amounts to multiple loop devices as its backend.
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--The kernel is already bloated enough, thank you - let's keep crap like this out of it. It's not even relevant for most of the Linux user base.
--I doubt it would ever be approved by the kernel maintainers anyhow, but you never know, there might be someone crazy enough that thinks this is somehow a good idea. Sigh
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It may not be relevant, but it's a modular kernel, with runtime loadable modules, so a one more module that takes 100kb of disk space shouldn't be a big deal. No runtime memory or performance costs until you use it.
Just tried it in a VM - doesn't work (Score:1)
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What about Funtoo? (Score:1)
belt conveyor (Score:1)