she/they

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: December 31st, 2023

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  • Most packages are purely additive to to system. If GNOME is part of the base system, I don’t care because I can just not use it. For packages that are mutually exclusive, well, usually that’s the distro picking it for you anyway, but if you insist on changing them then OverlayFS lets you mask files in the base.

    For something like Arch or Gentoo, the read-only partition approach absolutely won’t work, but I know Fedora’s been working on an OSTree immutable approach, so it’s still technically a mutable partition but it’s defined declaratively and is still easy to roll back.



  • If it was on something like BTRFS it’d probably be fine, though I imagine there’s still a small window where the FS could flush while the file is being written. renameat2 has the EXCHANGE flag to atomically switch 2 files, so if arch maintainers want to fix it they could do

    1. Write to temporary file
    2. Fsync temporary file
    3. Renameat2 EXCHANGE temporary and target
    4. Fsync directory (optional, since a background flush would still be atomic, just might take some time)