quite often, when working on a project, i have to install several packages and libraries that, most certainly, i’ll never use again after the project is done, so i need to remember to remove them. what i usually did was:

1. install the packages as dependencies (pacman -S –asdeps) and then,
2. later, when project is done, check my database for all installed packages that depended on no other explicitly installed package (pacman -Qdt).

the thing is that, over time, and many simultaneous projects, the listing gets crowded, and mixed up with optional dependencies for packages that i use (i install them as dependencies so they get removed when i remove the main package (pacman -Rncs)).

what i needed was a feature to “mark this installation with a reason: this project”. no, pacman does not support that, afaik. but it does support something perhaps better: meta-packages! for example, for the odtone project (my thesis depends on), i created the odtone-meta package that depends on all the packages that are needed, and has no particular source! thus, all i need to do is install the package, all dependencies are managed automatically! the PKGBUILD:

pkgname=odtone-meta
pkgver=001
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="This package depends on all necessary packages for odtone"
arch=('any')
url="http://helios.av.it.pt/embedded/odtone/index.html"
license=('LGPL')
depends=('boost' 'boost-libs' 'rasqal' 'raptor' 'redland' 'redland-storage-sqlite')

this way, when the project is finished, i just remove the odtone-meta package, and everything that isn’t a dependency for another package is just removed!

neat!!

the problem with -Rncs is that, with time, people tend to not look at the dependencies… a few months ago i wanted my rm commands safe, so i aliased it to interactive. not too much later i figured that removing directories (lots of files) that way was a pain in the ass, so i came up with rmf, an alias for a more powerfull rm… after a while i didn’t use rm any more, only rmf: school project down the drain!

i didn’t manage to recover it from the filesystem, i did manage to recover the project but some coding was required again. these days rm is a function that prints whatever is being removed and requires me to input “yes” in order to confirm… to date i haven’t typed the word by mistake, but when that is close to happen i’ll choose a more complicated work…

everyone has been through a similar situation. we get so much used to the cues that keep us from making mistakes that we end up ignoring them. next week i’m supposed to give a 10 minute talk about based on an article by ratwani, mccurry and trafton, where they acknowledge the same situation but plan on solving only postcompletion errors — by analising user’s eye movements!

to launch with great style, i think a recursive acronym is something that shouldn’t even be discussed. recursive acronyms are extremely cool! not even my teachers [1][2] come up with those, and they pay real attention to project names, as they start with a small sentence that explains the whole project, match all the upper casing combination and choose the one that suits them best. at least that’s what it looks like.

so, at this point, “aingnbsdlalfs” stands for “aingnbsdlalfs is not …”

the second part of the name can be explained by the fact that it not actually that much recently came to many user’s attention that a lot of people are leaving gentoo to cope with archlinux as their default operating system. this graph shows you exactly how many:

now this is where you agree to everything i say because this was the first picture ever embedded in a page on this domain.

i have nothing against that! what i do have something against, though, is for someone to say that archlinux is a distro that is meant to be incredibly fast without having to set compiler flags, some other neat stuff some users don’t want to know about and, the worst of all, having to compile everything from source which, for some people, getting a usable system up and running means days.

gentoo stands for geeks et nerds, too. i have nothing against people who have the time and the machine to deal with software compilation but i, for one, like to need a package and have it running in the following minute, rather than postponing the affairs to the following day just for the sake of speed and whatever they also claim to obtain.

one thing is true: arch is optimized. i believe, though, that arch is optimized in a sense that it won’t run on rottening hardware. no specific actions are taken for arch to run faster than any other distro, and i say that because, as a simple example, peoplw claim having a more responsive less memory using debian i386 system as compared to the i686 arch with roughly the same software (search the forums for more discussions…).

this results in the second part of the name: “aingnbsdlalfs is not gentoo …”.

some other thing a few might have noticed is there have been made some comparisons between freebsd and archlinux. again: wrong. i believe freebsd is a much more solid project (just check the website, that is enough =)) when compared to arch or any other linux distribution out there. they follow much more restrict policies and patterns and, in the end, it’s not even linux, it’s bsd!! there is a similarity in the way the system boots up and in the package management though, once more, you are supposed to compile a lot more than you’d like. there’s just too much physical difference between both.

ends up explaining that “aingnbsdlalfs is not gentoo nor bsd …”.

back in the day when i think i was one of the first archlinux users here at my university, or even the whole country (really long shot =P), and this means halfway its existance (wombat), i had in my mind that i wasn’t a very knowledgeable linux user, and that i’d have to get both my hands and my brain dirty in order to use arch. arch gave me a somewhat solid comprehension of how a system might work, having never fiddled with much more that debian and ubuntu. arch is beautiful in this way because i see it as a finely tinkered lego construction. you have the master setup provided by the arch devs and then they give you small pieces that you can add to it. with the help of the best package manager they tell you which pieces can work together and which can’t, so that you can borrow them, stick them together, but then you have to tell some of them where they are and what they can and should do.

unfortunately, these days, due to a very kind and helpful community, archlinux is no longer about elitism, it’s becoming about popularity. sure that’s good, and sure that’s awfull. it’s good because more people get involved, and more people become aware of its existance. it’s awfull because with those come the people who bring nothing constructive and claim to want to learn more about linux. the thing is this isn’t the way to learn linux. arch is a mesh of “technologies” and ideas with one simple goal in mind: keeping it simple. not noob simple, structure simple, just like i previously explained.

it has been a long time since i heard anyone mention linux from scratch. the first answer to “why lfs” in their site is: “we teach people how linux works”. just like that, there you go, learn linux! and arch is now called “aingnbsdlalfs is not gentoo nor bsd, let alone linux from scratch”

now seriously, and i don’t believe anyone got here, i think that archlinux is great just the way it is, and it is really good that it comes to as much people’s attention as it comes. i would just like arch not to fall in a democracy, because with more naive users the system might start diverging from the kiss philosophy, which i support being the only and true reason to prefer archlinux over any other linux distribution.