Upgrades is any security or big fix as well. Those tend to be quite safe in point release distros. Upgrading to a new point release version is has all the same problems the rolling release had over the same period all bundle in one messy upgrade (which makes them a huge pain to deal with as they often compound). But between those, the patch upgrades tend to be quite smooth.

I would say the over a longer time period rolling release break in bigger way less often. But they tend to have more but smaller breakages that are easy to trivial to fix.

Less chance of an update breaking things. Lots of small and frequent updates, instead of rare and large update packs/stacks.

I would say a rolling distro update has a higher chance of it breaking something. Each one might bring in a new major version of something that has breaking changes in it. But that breakage is typically easier to fix and less of a problem.

Point release distros tend to bundle up all their breakages between major versions so breaks loads of things at once. And that IMO can be more of a hassle then dealing with them one at a time as they come out.

I tended to find I needed to reinstall point release distros instead of upgrading them as it was less hassle. Which is still more disruptive then fixing small issues over time as the crop up.

It has an LTS kernel. Not a separate version. This does not make everything LTS. This is very different from LTS distros.

It is not just about your pc hardware. I much prefer running the latest software on it as I regularly use features from tools added in the last version of something. I would hate to have to wait 6 months to a year to be able to use new features that make my life easier. That might not be every bit of software I use but enough core things that I would notice.

Email support was the bain of my existence. I forgot how many misconfigured system I came across decades ago that would fill up their filesystem with logs from crons in the root mail dir. Such a stupid default setting. We have vastly better methods for monitoring systems these days then firing off an email when a cron runs.

You can also easily see when the job last ran, if it was successful and when it will next run. As well as just trigger the service if you want it to run now.

sudo is not GPL3. It is not even GPL2. It is an old license that is just as permissive as the MIT license. It has never had any big problems with that being the case. I don’t think that coreutils being GPL has really done anything to force companies to contribute back to it. It is mostly fixed in its function and does not really have much room for companies taking and modifying it to a point where others will favor the closed version over the open on. And what it provides is fairly trivial functions overall that if someone did want to take part of it then it is not terribly hard to rewrite it from scratch.

GNU Coreutils is not the only implementation of those POSIX features - just the most popular one. FreeBSD has its own, there is busybox, the rust ports and loads of other rewrites of the same functionality to various degrees. None of that really matters though as they dont really add much if any value to what coreutils provides as there is just not that much more value to add to these utilities now.

And it is not like the GPL license of coreutils affects other binaries on the system. So if you dont need to modify it and it does not infect other things there is little point in trying to take it over or use an alternative.

MacOS does not use a later version because they cannot. But also they don’t care enough to even try to maintain their own.

GPL is important on other larger/more complex bits of software. But on coreutils/sudo IMO it does not matter nearly as much as people think it does.

I don’t think there is a good license for that. The ones MongoDB used turned the open source community against them. But that is not really my point. I just mean that some projects using MIT won’t suddenly mean every company will start stealing and closing that software. Some things like coreutils and sudo just don’t have the commercial value to make that worth the effort. So there is no real need to worry about these two projects IMO. Other projects are a different story altogether though. Each project needs to make its own decision on what licence best suits it. The GPL is not the one and only license that is worth using.

Inertia also accounts for time and popularity. The longer something has been around and popular the more inertia it has and the harder it is for something to change it. Back in 1985 things had a lot less inertia then they do today - C and C++ have been gaining it constantly for 30 years since then.

Coreutils has little commercial value to take can create a proprietary fork of. There is little value that can be added to it to make it worthwhile. The same is for sudo - which has had a permissive licence from the start. In all that time no one has cared enough to fork it for profit.

Not saying that is true of every project. But at the same time even GPL software has issues with large companies profiting off it and not contributing back. Since unless you are distributing binaries the GPL does not force you to do anything really. See mongodb and their move to even more restrictive licences.

The GPL is not the only thing that stops companies from taking open software. Not does if fully protect against that.

Not does everything need to be GPL. It makes sense for some projects and less sense for others. Especially libraries as that basically forces no company from using them for anything. Which is also not what you want from a library.

You can profit from GPL software. The only restriction is if you distribute it you also need to distribute modifications under the GPL.

GPL also does nothing for software as a service since it is never distributed.

GPL even explicitly allows selling GPL software. This is effectively what redhat do. They just need to distribute the source to those that they sell it to.

The US government does not like welfare programs because it gives money to the poor. They would rather give tax reliefs to the rich instead.

There is loads of evidence that welfare programs can save more money then they cost. But that does not funnel money to those in charge.

I find most people don’t create good unit tests. They create them too small which results in them being fragile to change or near useless. They end up being a tray for future you not a love letter.

The number of times I have refactored some code and broken a whole bunch of unit tests is unreal. These types of tests are less then useless. If you cannot refactor code then what is the point in a unit test? I don’t need to know that if I don’t change the code under test it doesn’t break… I need to know that when I change code my assumptions still hold true.

We should be testing modules as a whole using their external API (that is external to the module, not necessarily the project as a whole), not individual functions. Most people seem to call these integration tests though…

5 years is optimistic. More likely 10-20 years at least. Established languages have a lot of inertia and it takes a very long time for that to change.

Why wrap it in a function at all? Why not just put the if at the top of the file?

While true and some will do it for that reason, I bet most do it simply because the friction to forking is so low.

Some might have an intention to work on it but then don’t or might start looking at it in detail then give up or get to busy or lose interest.

Others might just click it to save it for later.

And don’t forget all the people that click it by accident.

It’s not like it is a big investment to click the button.

Probably something to do with their main package deleting the pacman lock file so it can run a nested pacman update command… Which means two pacman instances running at the same time and nothing stopping other ones after that nested one has completed.

I have more then once gave up on pressing up, hit ctrl + c to reset only to see the command I wanted briefly flash up as I am hitting ctrl + c

I personally hate global menu bars. They do not work with focus follows mouse. The way menus currently work is fine for me and I would not want to lose that to, IMO, a much worst system. Any global menu implementation would need to be able to be disabled and better to have it off by default. And I would rather see effort in developing other features personally - though mostly as I would never use this feature.

* in your commands is expanded by the shell before tar sees them. It also does not expand hidden files.

So when you do admin/* the shell expands to all non hidden files inside admin. Which does not include admin/.htaccess. So tar is never told to archive this file, only the other non hidden files and folders. It will still archive hidden files and folders nested deeper though.

In the second example * expands to admin and the other does which are not hidden at that level. Then tar can open these dirs and recursivly archive all files and folders including the hidden ones.

You can see what commands actually get executed after any shell expansions if you run set -x first. Then set +x to turn that off again.

Here is an example using ls:

$ set -x; ls -A foo/*; ls -A *; set +x
+ ls --color=tty -A foo/baz
foo/baz
+ ls --color=tty -A foo
.bar  baz
+ set +x