Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Why is Debian the way it is? (blog.liw.fi)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It’s thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

How do Debian and other distros feel about Rust? It's a fantastic language that can improve security, but it doesn't have a stable ABI and they don't really do the whole dynamically linked library thing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

It's a really good question which seems to have a complicated answer. This page here led me to this here (among other documents).

The short of it seems to be have that if you think of Rust in terms of "crates" instead of "libraries", then it's still possible to package in a way that conforms to Debian's self-contained avoid-redundancy style, though the details of it seem a bit tricky.

[–] Sir_Simon_Spamalot 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's quite a chicken-egg problem.

Adoption requires maturity, but maturity requires adoption.

No, toy projects does not count!