Carbs Linux Blog

IS CARBS DEAD? (Or February 2024 News Post)

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Every once in a while (maybe like once a month) I check the IRC logs and see someone asking for help while I was not available. Unfortunately, the amount of outdated packages are rising, 125 at the time of writing this post, which inadvertently causes issues for people trying to setup or maintain Carbs installations.

I have just recently seen two messages that were posted on the IRC channel a couple of days ago asking if Carbs was still maintained so I decided to make a post addressing the state in hand.

Is Carbs Dead?

I am fully aware that I haven't been doing a proper job as the maintainer for the last couple of months so I can really see where the question is coming from. Carbs is not dead, but it would be quite valid to say that it is in a comatose state. I have been spending these last months focusing mainly on my university, and doing that, I even missed the 4th anniversary of Carbs, and forgot to make a post as I usually had done.

However, Carbs is a project that is very dear to my heart, and I still use it personally as my daily system, so I have no intention on killing it any time soon. Still, there is good need for better communication on how my maintenance of the distribution will be moving forward.

Future of the Distribution

I am still working hard on my tasks as a university student. This means that I can only work on the distribution periodically. Luckily, Carbs is a very self-sustainable project and it can be easily updated without the need of a maintainer. However, leaving a distribution unmaintained is rarely healthy for an open-source project, so let's talk about my views on each component that makes Carbs a functioning Linux distribution:

CPT

Apart from the occasional bug fix, performance improvements, and documentation, I don't think CPT needs active maintenance, and I consider it to be feature complete. I haven't made any release over a year, and it's likely that I won't be adding any new features any time soon.

Package Repository

This is in general the tricky part. A user can update packages on their own without the requirement of a maintainer. The Carbs Linux repository is part of Repology, a hub that monitors a very large number of repositories to provide packaging information. Since tracking hundreds of software packages for updates, and issues is near impossible for a person alone without a unified interface, I use Repology API to follow outdated packages on our repository. Any user on the event that I leave the distribution unmaintained, can go to Repology and look for more information on outdated packages to update their own.

I have also written some tools that help me follow these information on my terminal instead of requiring a browser, which I plan on releasing somewhat soon. Here are some screenshots, as a teaser:

This leads to what I believe is the most important part of this post.

Maintainership

I am planning on delegating maintainership for certain parts of the repository. This will start with me orphaning some packages found in the community repository and leaving them for adoption. Packages orphaned for more than a 3 month period will be dropped from the repositories. The dropped packages will be moved to a graveyard repository where someone wanting the package can request to maintain it.

Once the repository back to its usual state, I will also start looking for a second maintainer to help me with overall repository management. If this sounds interesting to you please do reach out to me from my maintainer email (or on Mastodon @cem@mas.to)!

See you on the next post!

January 2023 News Post

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year everyone, and welcome to the first Carbs Linux "News Post" in nearly two years (wow that really is a long time). We have a couple of news that I want to discuss in detail, so I decided that it warrants a blog post on its own.

Bye bye, X.org

Throughout the years I was already clear on my intentions to drop xorg support at one point, and in my opinion both Wayland and its support around it has matured enough to make the complete switch. I am currently writing this blog post on, as of yet unreleased, pure-GTK build of Emacs which does not depend on any X11 components.

Carbs Linux was first published on December 2019 with xorg support only, and had Wayland support since February 2021. This month, all xorg specific libraries, drivers, and utilities (except for xwayland) have been dropped from the repository. If you are currently an xorg user, you can read the Switching from Xorg section of the user manual. Feel free to jump on the IRC channel for requesting help.

CPT Version 7 Release

After almost a year of delay, I am happy to finally announce that the 7th major version of our package manager is released. You can learn more about the changes from the ChangeLog in the source repository. Some of the highlights include:

Package manager updates will be re-entrant from now on, meaning that you don't have to run cpt-update twice.
The new configuration directory is now available as /etc/cpt/ in order to not clutter the /etc/ directory.
Package manager hooks are now handled in a different manner.
cpt-size program can now sort the files based on size.

And many more changes and improvements along this one! Coming with this change, I will also be releasing a new rootfs tarball soon. Follow the news feed for more information.

See you on the next post!

Three Years of Carbs Linux

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Dec 10th, 2022 marked the third year of Carbs Linux, so this post is unfortunately two days late :) Even though I did my best to keep the package repository up to date as much as possible, I was quite distant to the project in general, and was unable to release the version 7 of CPT as I promised on my last blog post (which was the birthday post of last year). Fortunately, I believe that the distribution has matured enough to not require constant observation and intervention to function. Again, I want to thank everyone who has contributed to Carbs Linux in any way, people who continue to hang around the IRC channel even though it's been a pretty quiet one this year.

I hope to bring some of my attention back to the project the upcoming year. Version 7 is mostly finished, but I still haven't released it to update the documentation and tests, so I am planning on making a release in the upcoming months :)

See you on the next post!

Two Years of Carbs Linux

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

            )   )
           (*) (*)
       _____i___i_____
      (_______________)
      | @ @ @ @ @ @ @ |
    __(_______________)__
   (_____________________)
   |/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/|
 __(_____________________)__
(___________________________)
| @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ |
(___________________________)

Today marks the second year of Carbs Linux, and even though I'm not able to create a long blog post about it at this time of the year, I'm a big fan of special dates, and milestones. I want to thank everyone that has been a part of this experience, people sending patches, people hanging around in the IRC to chat with me. It's certainly a much more enjoyable experience with people like you, and I hope I'll see you in the next year :)

Expect a blog post on CPT-7 mid-January.

October 2021 News Post

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After a long absence during the summer and working my way through moving to Berlin, I think it's the appropriate time to write a new blog post about the changes that arrived to the distribution. I have started writing this post in August, and now it's finished! Only a few months late. Since I have been holding this post for so long, there are quite a numerous details to be discussed.

Repository meta file

You might have noticed that most packages now contain a file named meta. This file contains a small description, license for the package, and the maintainer information of the package. A sample meta file looks like the following:

description: Carbs Packaging Tools
license:     MIT
maintainer:  Cem Keylan <cem@carbslinux.org>

Inclusion of this file makes it easier to query package information, as it is now implemented inside the cpt-search utility. Running cpt-search -q puts the utility in query mode, and makes use of the package descriptions when searching for packages. Unlike the default operation mode, using the -q flag makes the tool output in a pretty format, which is not meant to be parsed by other tools. The format is similar to the output of apt search. Below is an example of running cpt-search -q carbs:

baselayout@/home/cem/repos/main/core/baselayout 3-1
  Carbs Linux base directories / scripts / configuration

carbs-docs@/home/cem/repos/main/core/carbs-docs 20201226-1
  Carbs Linux documentation

carbs-init@/home/cem/repos/main/core/carbs-init 1.2.2-3
  Carbs Linux init scripts

cl-utils@/home/cem/repos/main/core/cl-utils 1.0.1-1
  Carbs Linux repository utilities

cpt@/home/cem/repos/main/core/cpt 6.2.0-1
  Carbs Packaging Tools

The package manager library provides the pkg_query_meta() function to easily parse the meta file, which is further explained in the package manager documentation. Also see cpt-search(1) for more information on the flags and their behaviours.

Blake3 checksums

The package manager now uses BLAKE3 to generate checksums, however this change is backwards compatible, and does not break any old packages that are lying about. If for some reason you need a package to have old SHA256 checksums, you can generate the checksums using cpt-checksum -s, which is what I'm using the generate the checksums for the cpt package itself.

Message of the Day files

With the release of the version 6.1.0 of CPT, I have added a MOTD file for displaying updates and important information from the repository. This file is a simple plaintext file that should be present on the root of the repository, and it is printed to the standard output during the cpt-update command.

Adding the core repository to the tarball

I am thinking of adding a copy of the core repository to the release tarballs. By adding it, it will be a good incentive to remove the git package from the tarball, and let the user choose which repository backend they want to install (git/fossil/rsync) instead of enforcing git.

Packaging Linux Kernel headers

The kernel header files are now packaged from a separate source tarball that only contains the kernel headers so that the downloads are much smaller. For comparison, the kernel tarball is sized ~110 Megabytes, while our header tarball is 1.6 Megabytes. The sources for the headers can be found on https://fossil.carbslinux.org/linux-headers.

You can also fork the package and install LTS headers that are also provided by this repository, if they better fit your needs.

Website Update

No blog post is complete without me butchering this website, trying to shove it into a different static site generation software, breaking lots of links in the process, and write it up here as if it were some sort of achievement or something. I've switched to Hugo this time, because it's obviously better(TM) than using org-publish. Well, let's see how long my position on that will last.

I have created symlinks for the time being, but you will need to update your RSS feeds for the blog and the news:

I will also no longer be serving plaintext pages, with the exception of the installation guide. The documentation is available offline through cpt and carbs-docs packages (in both multiple formats), and the website is clean enough to be easily navigated through a terminal browser.

June 2021 News Post

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Hello! This month was rather slow for me while I was mostly away for some vacation and I had some connectivity issues. I mostly tried to keep the packages up to date, and to keep up with the IRC channel as I've had some issues with the new logger we are using in the channel. I have very recently returned to home, and I'm mostly working on with the next release of the package manager.

Hopefully, next month will be more newsworthy as I will take my time to work on the new package repository backend, and document its features.

See you on the next post!

May 2021 News Post

Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to May! It has been a rather quiet month, mostly dedicated to fixing some small bugs and working on some features.

Fossil support and new repository backend

In the previous news post I mentioned adding fossil support to the package manager. Fossil support is now merged to the trunk branch of the package manager, and I have completely rewritten the repository backend which has better performance and is easier to extend. There are still some changes to make, but the feature will be added in the 6.1.0 release.

Moving IRC channel

After the recent controversies surrounding Freenode, we have also switched to the new Libera IRC network. Since our previous logger globbot is also shutting down, I have set up an IRC logger powered by litterbox. The IRC logs can be found on https://irclogs.carbslinux.org. The website includes both a searchable web interface, and plaintext dumps of daily logs. Even though the channel is low-volume, I think logging it is extremely important.

New i686 release

I have decided to make an i686 release last week because it was really outdated, but it will likely be the last one depending on its use on the few following months. If you are interested in keeping support for the architecture, feel free to join the IRC channel to let me know. Maintaining i686 isn't really much of a burdon on me, but there is no point in maintaining an architecture that isn't used by anyone.

Compared to the last month, there aren't much news, and there have been other things that I needed to attend to. I started writing this post on the 13th, and only had the time to finish it now!

See you on the next post!

April 2021 News Post

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings from the cruellest month of the year! We have some important topics this month that I wanted to share with you.

CPT version 6 Release

I have released the version 6 of our package manager and did a few bugfix releases, which contained a variety of changes made since December. The Changelog details them on our new Fossil repository, which I will be talking about more on a later section of this post.

As I have mentioned on the previous news post, I was holding the release for a few bugfixes, and documentation. The documentation is complete enough to be shipped, but there are still some things to add. The manual pages, and the documentation for the user tools, however, are considered complete.

New rootfs tarball

A new tarball has been released after almost 7 months! This tarball targets the x86_64 architecture, and can be installed following the instructions.

Signing Releases

Releases are now signed with the OpenBSD tool signify(1) instead of GnuPG. There are two packages on our repository that provide this tool, otools , and signify . Debian-based distributions usually provide it under signify-openbsd, and other distributions provide it as just signify. Each release will have a different public key, those can be found on https://dl.carbslinux.org/keys. Since the public keys are so small, I will also be embedding the latest release key to the README file of the package repository, and the installation manual.

The state of i686

As you may have noticed, I haven't made a release for the i686 architecture this time. I won't be retiring it, but my old laptop, which was the reason I initially ported Carbs Linux to the architecture in the first place, has stopped working. I won't be retiring it just now, but I also don't see anyone else interested in it. If you are interested in taking the maintainership for the architecture, you can send a mail to the mailing-list. Otherwise, I will be dropping the architecture by the end of June.

Fossil

I have recently been toying around with the alternate version control system, Fossil. Since no Carbs Linux News Post is complete without some sort of repository migration¹, the canonical repository of the package manager has been moved to Fossil on https://fossil.carbslinux.org/cpt. However, this doesn't mean that the mailing-list on Sourcehut will be removed, those will be in place until I decide to serve mailing lists on our own server.

As time goes on, I am also planning on switching some other repositories to Fossil as well. I will be switching the Documentation repository next, and the Package repository when Fossil support is added to the package manager.

Fossil support on the package manager

Right now, the package manager supports Git, Mercurial, and Rsync repositories. I do want to add Fossil repository support, however this might take long to implement as I will be rewriting the repository backend to simplify and collect the operations made by the package manager to manage package repositories.

I'm aiming for a new system that makes it easy and simple to manage repositories outside of the package manager's scope as well. These changes can be followed from the repository-backend branch, which as of the time of writing this blog post, contains no new check-ins, and specifically the status of Fossil support can be tracked from this ticket.

Switching back to LibreSSL

This is the 4th time Carbs Linux is switching SSL providers, but I am planning on this to be the final change for the foreseeable future. The reason behind this change is pragmatism. Even though BearSSL is sufficient enough to run the base, some essential packages (such as Python for its SSL module) depended on LibreSSL, meaning that using LibreSSL was mandatory if you weren't simply using the bare-minimum. Using 2 separate SSL libraries is pointless when you have the option to easily use a single one.

Consistent communication

I have decided to be more consistent on these news posts, I will try to make these every 15th of the month. I have also recently came back to IRC to be as active as possible. At least I can always be reached by mail, if all else fails!

See you on the next post!

Footnotes

"No mention of openbsd on the internet is complete without a long thread about source control migration." – tedu@ https://gameoftrees.org

March 2021 News Post

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Greetings! I am really happy to announce some few changes to the distribution. I wanted to write a new blog post to summarise them so you can get up to what is happening in Carbs Linux.

Switching to Sourcehut

I have been thinking of moving development to Sourcehut for a while now. If your repository remotes reside at GitHub you are encouraged to switch them to Sourcehut. Mailing lists for discussion, development, and announcements have also been created for both the distribution, and the package manager using Sourcehut as the host. See the page on mailing lists for more information on subscribing to the mailing lists.

This does mean that issue trackers now reside at Sourcehut, and I will be deactivating those in GitHub very soon. I have yet to decide whether on keeping the mirrors or deactivating them completely, but I will be giving three months of notice if it is decided to move away from GitHub completely. Regardless, the main repositories are still hosted at our own server, and I have no intentions on changing that for the foreseeable future.

State of our own Git repository

In the near future, I will be moving our git server, and will be opening spots for other users, who want to make use of the git server. People can use it to serve their own cpt repositories, or personal projects that can be related to Carbs. I will post an announcement when this will happen, and a blog post that tells more about the new repository. Expect more by the end of March.

Wayland and Dbus

There are new repositories for dbus, and wayland, which are still works in progress. These are meant to be options for those who request it, and are not meant to be enforced package repositories. For example, any package outside of the dbus repository shouldn't require it to work, and shouldn't list it as a dependency. Packages can still be written using those as optional dependencies.

This change also raises the question of whether Carbs is ditching Xorg or not. No, we are not ditching Xorg, Wayland is added as to serve an extra option for those who don't own graphics cards from some specific manufacturer.

Next release for CPT

I had been working on the next major release for the package manager since December, and it is coming close to completion. This release focuses more on the library itself, and using the library more effectively on the contrib tools. Unfortunately, until this time, the library wasn't properly documented, and there weren't any unit tests for the library. Even though, the changes to the package manager are close to completion, documentation and tests are what is holding me from making the next release.

Website Update

I have recently updated the website in its entirety so that it looks more appealing. I have updated the stylesheets and created a stylesheet repository and I am planning on extending it to use with other Carbs websites.

The website is now generated using Emacs Org Mode, and its biggest advantage is that I can freely write posts without thinking about plaintext output, which held me back from writing big posts. I have also created a few org-mode link abbreviations such as the one that let me easily link to packages. There are also few disadvantages from using this method, which I am hoping to resolve as moving forward. One of these disadvantages made me remove the generated website from the git repository, now I generate and serve the website through post-receive hooks. Once I resolve these, however, I will be adding the docs directory back to the repository.

First Year of Carbs Linux

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

December 10, 2020 marks the first year after the initial release of Carbs Linux. When I forked the KISS Linux repository on the 9th of December, I was fairly new to package management. Carbs Linux used to be almost identical to KISS Linux. A lot has changed since then:

[2020 Jan 13] Replaced default init system to sinit
[2020 Jan 15] Packaged WebKit2GTK
[2020 May 17] Added bearssl on the testing repository
[2020 May 28] Added rsync repository support to kiss
[2020 Jun 03] Replaced bison with byacc
[2020 Jun 11] Replaced libressl with bearssl
[2020 Jun 24] Replaced kiss with cpt

I have really enjoyed maintaining and developing this distribution, and I want to thank everyone who was involved in some way or another. While I have slowed down in development due to college workload, I am still actively maintaining all the packages on the repository. I do have some ideas that I am thinking of implementing during the semester break. Hope to see you all in January.

August 2020 News Post

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are having some stalls during this summer, as I am currently working on university-related stuff. Nonetheless, there are some important changes that I want to share in this month's post.

Carbs Packaging Tools

This month I have reworked kiss into a new package manager, now renamed as cpt. Updating kiss will now bootstrap the new package manager, so you don't have to manually edit your system. If you don't like the idea of this, you can look up the post-install script on core/kiss and apply the changes manually.

You will also need to rename your KISS_* variables to CPT_*. So, KISS_PATH becomes CPT_PATH.

The rework changes the previous commands on the package manager into standalone tools, and move the package manager functions to a library. This makes it easier for a user to import functions and variables from the package manager, and extend the package manager with their own intended way. Previously this required ugly hacks and workarounds to use the package manager functions. I will be making use of these changes to re-implement binary package management functions as well.

If you want to use the library on your script you can simply do this:

#!/bin/sh
. cpt-lib
(...)

There are obviously some clean-up and simplifications needed in this new tool-based package management method.

Docs

I have added documentation for the distribution, and finally updated the guide for installation. It is now almost complete. These docs can be installed to your system for online viewing. I will also add a documentation crawler similar to how werc works (but as an offline viewer). You can find carbs-docs from the repository. Currently, the documentation lacks but I will be adding new stuff. These will solely be distribution specific documentation and will not be a wiki-like source. If anyone would like to contribute to a wiki-like documentation source, I would happily re-open the distribution wiki. You can find the source on https://github.com/CarbsLinux/docs.

Re-opening the Carbs Linux server

Back in May, I had shutdown the Carbs Linux server due to financial issues, but I am slowly reverting to the self-hosted model. Back then, the git repositories were mirrored to GitHub, and the management was overall much more flexible. The server used to run Carbs Linux as well (that was fun and horrifying at the same time). Now, I will be relaunching the git server which will be the upstream source before August 5. You can switch your remote, but GitHub will stay as a remote nonetheless.

EDIT: The git-server is up!

June 2020 News Post

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This will be an active month for Carbs as major changes to the base and the package manager will be coming up.

Statically linking the base

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to simplify the base and statically link the core (mostly binaries rather than libraries). I usually see some people extremely opposed to static linking as I also see the opposite on people.

I believe that binaries on the core should always be linked statically. This ensures that an SONAME bump to libObscure.so will not break the core functionality of your system, forcing you to use external resources to recover from such an issue. As long as you can compile, use core utilities, edit text, and access the web, you can solve any given issue on your system.

However, I don't think that removing shared libraries is sensible either. Not every piece of software out there is good quality enough to be statically linked.

Major changes on the core repository

There have been drastic changes to the core repository and the base rootfs this month (with more on the way). Right now changes are as follows.

Removed from Core

git
libressl
grub
bison
dhcpcd
ubase

Added to Core

bearssl, as a libressl replacement
byacc, as a bison replacement

Statically linked

kiss
neatvi
mandoc
byacc
m4
e2fsprogs
make
pkgconf
sbase
libnl
wpa_supplicant
bearssl

Making the wiki available offline

Soon, all documentation regarding Carbs Linux will be avaialable to be installed from the core repository in a carbs-docs package along with its own document crawler. Currently, the documentation regarding the installation process is a little outdated which will also receive some important updates.

ISO image for Carbs

I am thinking of releasing an ISO image in order to provide a standardized environment for installation along with installation helper tools in the spirit of arch-install-scripts. Let's see how that's going to play out.

kiss 2.0.0 and Overall Changes

Thu, 28 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Carbs Linux kiss version 2.0.0 has been released which introduces rsync repositories.

Git is no longer a mandatory dependency for the package manager, every git source on the core repository has been replaced with https sources (sbase, sinit), and rootfs tarballs will no longer ship with git. Repositories in the upcoming tarball will be rsync repositories.

Git is now on the extra repository and is still (optionally) used in the package manager.

The idea behind this change is size reductions and increased speed with rsync. As I said on the previous post, git repositories get larger and larger over the time span. Currently my personal copy of the git repository is around 77MB and I have forked KISS Linux (as a shallow copy) around December. Obviously, I have commits that I ommitted. I tend to create commits I dislike, which I change with git reset --soft HEAD^, which doesn't actually remove the commits, etc. A user will have a repository much smaller than mine.

This is a precaution with the added bonuses of speed and dropping a mandatory dependency.

You can see the rest of the changelog here.

Binary Repositories

A few days ago, I have also published kiss-bin, a first version for managing binary repositories. Currently, there are some caveats that I'll be fixing along the way. I decided not to include this in the package manager natively as managing the source based and binary based packages together adds levels of complexity that we do not want. Instead, this is an extension for kiss which sources the package manager as a library. I hope to see it being adopted by others interested on the matter as well.

The Relation of Carbs and KISS

Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Since I have forked KISS, I have received many questions that can be summarized as "Why?". I have realized that I never truly answered this question. That's the reason I am writing this post, to give some background on Carbs, and some differences between KISS Linux and Carbs Linux for anyone who may be wondering. Perhaps I could make this a "FAQ" page later on.

History

I had the idea of creating my own Linux distribution since the May of 2019. Back then, I had my own Linux from Scratch build, and I wanted to slim it down my own way and replace the software (with musl,sbase,etc.). The name Carbs Linux was in my mind since then. I wanted to write my own package manager, but I wasn't satisfied with anything I had built.

I had written some incomplete package managers (all named fat) and I quickly threw them into the trash can, where they honestly belonged. I would want to share them with you for laughs, but my hard-drive got wiped and I have a problem of not doing an "initial commit" until a program I write is in a usable state.

I have obtained the 'carbslinux.org' domain name in September 2019, but then life got on the way, and I stopped for a long time.

One day on Reddit, I saw Dylan's post on r/unixporn about KISS, and I really thought that it was interesting. Here is my comment to Dylan on that post. I checked out the package manager and the repository. The packaging system was extremely clean and well-thought. I decided to give it a go and fork KISS.

Differences between KISS and Carbs

Now, I still baffle when people ask me this question. My intention was never to create a distribution with specific differences between KISS. My intention was being my own BDFL of a distribution I maintain. There are lots of differences between the main repositories, but they are subtle and not worth talking about. I personally never even installed KISS Linux on my system. So Carbs, isn't something like a downstream fork of KISS, it is just a distribution that was initially based on KISS.

I try to contribute as much as I can to KISS Linux. I think that it is a brilliant distribution, and it was a great starting point for Carbs. I am really grateful to Dylan and all the other contributors.

What I'm working on now

Currently I have a few projects that I'm working on for Carbs. These are,

A BSD port for Carbs. For a while, I have been working on BSD compatibility on my fork of the [package manager]. I have tested, without any more issues, on OpenBSD and FreeBSD. The biggest issues remaining are choosing a vendor for BSD, packaging the BSD source, and providing a minimal base (like busybox for BSD). If you aren't familiar with BSD, it has a single source code for all of the utilities (kernel, command line programs, etc.). Contributions (even chipping in ideas) are very welcome.

Adding binary package distribution support natively to the package manager. Biggest issue in small/old computers are compile times. This feature is for the bigger packages such as webkit, clang, llvm that take a considerable amount of time. Some computers with low memories cannot even compile firefox/webkit.

Adding rsync repository support to the package manager. This is not a current issue, but rather a futureproofing. As time passes, distribution repositories grow larger. KISS and Carbs are young distributions without this problem right now. But in something like 5 years, this size will presumably increase to hundreds of megabytes. At that point it will be pointless to have the repository sources unless you specifically need them.

What's up with all the init/service daemons?

If you have ever checked the repository, you may have noticed that there are lots of init/service related packages. I have had my fair share of time with all of them, and it is an area that I am really interested in. I have even written my own init daemon and service supervisor. I maintain all those packages on KISS Community Repository as well with the exception of busybox. Those are, busybox init/runit, runit, sinit, and sysmgr. I would definitely recommend checking out shinit and sysmgr.

Why I don't publicize Carbs

There are a couple of reasons I don't publicize Carbs a lot.

KISS is the better alternative in terms of support and community. I work on maintaining this distribution just as hard as Dylan, but in the end, Carbs is based on his original hard work, and I believe that he deserves the recognition more than I do.

Since I cannot answer questions like "What is the difference?", I prefer staying as the silent sibling project of KISS Linux. Plus, there is no point in dividing the newly-emerging community in half.

That's not because I don't have ideas for the future of Carbs, I do. I just think that I will deserve the recognition once those above lists are checked.

I think that's about it, if you have questions you can send me a mail, ping me on IRC (my handle is merakor), and I will be happy to answer. Maybe your question fits this post, and I can update it to thoroughly give an explanation.

Outsource Repository Concept

Fri, 10 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In April 3rd, I have added submodule support for Carbs Linux's fork of kiss. Now, from that sentence, it really doesn't sound exciting at all. But in reality, it opens a path to lots of creative output, and a better way to manage multi-user repositories (such as KISS Community).

When managing a repository of submodules, the repository maintainer's only job is to deal with adding packages. A package maintainer doesn't have to wait for the repository maintainer to update their packages, as they are only making the changes to their own repositories.

This way, an end-user can also track from their preferred maintainers, and do that with the tidyness of a single repository in their KISS_PATH.

Carbs Linux now has an outsource repository for some packages. Firefox and its dependencies have been purged from the main repository, but can be found on it.

https://github.com/CarbsLinux/outsource

Roadmap for Carbs

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a busy week. There are lots of changes in direction, and more to come. I want to talk a little about all of them.

Carbs Linux Server Going Down

It became harder to maintain and pay for the server, and I will be shutting it down in May. I am currently in the phase of carrying over everything to Github. The repository and the website is served on Github now. I have also moved the Wiki to Github and anyone can edit it there. There are some outdated posts that I will be fixing around this week.

I am not quite sure where to store the downloads page now. But I will be switching that to a new source as well. (Maybe SourceHut?)

I feel a little sad for switching, but serving on Github is faster, cheaper, and hassle-free.

Forking KISS

I had a personal fork of KISS, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I didn't intend to make it the default when I started it, but it has matured enough to be so. The package manager can now be found on this repository. See it for the added changes.

This will be a change for the better, as I can develop the package manager as it fits my views.

Small Changes on the Website

I have made some small changes on the website. The build is not dependent on Plan9 utilities anymore. It was fun messing around with rc and mk, but they are quite limited compared to POSIX shell.

RSS feeds are finally working as intended, both for the news section, and the blog section.

You can see every page's .txt output at the end of the page by clicking 'View Page Source'. Meanwhile, I will be updating some pages to be a little more 'human-readable'.

Outsources Repository

I have opened an outsource repository, which I will be pushing this week. I will add a new post when I am ready to push it. I think it will be interesting, it will also make more sense about the changes I have added to the package manager. The now empty repository, can be found here!

New Tarball

Finally, I have released a new tarball today, which can be obtained from the downloads page.

I am planning to add more of these update posts as I'm feeling better about the website structure overall.

Switching to New Website

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In case you haven't seen it before, this website was powered by werc. And even though I liked it really much, it was too powerful for a small website like this.

So I have decided to reimplement this website with my own static generation scripts. The source will probably be on its git repository when I decide to publish the website.

The generation requires Plan9 programs, although I have used them just for my enthusiasm. I have built the site with a combination of mk (instead of make), rc, and POSIX sh. I am not yet exactly familiar with rc, but I will replace the shell scripts when I feel like I can.