Hacker News Reader

Comment by loxias | Hacker News Reader

I think it's wonderful that there's an explosion of new exciting languages, it can only improve the quality of all our tools. I for one am looking forward to replacing my eons of MATLAB experience with Julia.

But I wish there was more of a convention in the F/OSS community that if your software isn't written in something universal (C, C++, shell and maybe python), then it also comes with a container of all that's necessary to run it.

It's frustrating to pollute my nicely packaged managed system with hundreds of locally installed python modules just to run one tool. Or, in this case, backport and rebuild a language specific build tool simply to compile. :)

View on HN

Have you used pipx? I really like it for installing Python tools because it automatically creates a virtual environment for them so that their dependencies don't affect anything else.

https://pypa.github.io/pipx/

>shell

>universal

* laughs in Windows, then cries *

I used to straddle the two worlds, maintained and supported a multi-site AD domain with AFS integration for user $HOME and some sort of unholy LDAP/kerberos bridge for login. About once every year or two I'll miss something about the way Windows does things, compared to normal (meaning "linux"). Like the NTFS permissions model, that's cool.

But it's just once a year :) And the last time I was deep in windows was win7, whenever that was. I tried to use a win10 machine and gave up.

Besides, I thought the big new feature in modern windows was that WSL improved to the point you can run unix tools! ;)

> and some sort of unholy LDAP/kerberos bridge for login

It's really not that bad, the AD-IPA cross-forest trust is really solid as is the native sssd-ad integration if IPA is too much. Honestly I can't really imagine it any other way now, so much work has been put into AD support that it's actually the best login experience on Linux at the moment. OpenLDAP is definitely showing its age -- dgmr I use it for all my personal infra because it's free and my use-cases are dead simple but we got to delete so much bespoke code after migrating off it at work.

> AD-IPA

I'm not sure, and you undoubtedly know more and are more up to date than I, but I don't believe any of these things existed in 2005, when I was on the aforementioned team. Or, maybe they did exist but management decided an internal implementation was better.

Getting Windows to accept the user profile in an AFS path I recall being particularly vexing.

> About once every year or two I'll miss something about the way Windows does things, compared to normal (meaning "linux"). Like the NTFS permissions model, that's cool.

FreeBSD would be up your alley. Its native ACLs are NFSv4 format, a superset of NTFS ACLs. You need to enable it explicitly on UFS2, but it's default on ZFS.

FWIW I've had reports of people using difftastic on Windows successfully.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com