OS Upgrades Powered By Git

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Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 9, 2012 @04:50AM from the sounds-like-a-good-idea dept.

JamieKitson writes "The latest Webconverger 15 release is the first Linux distribution to be automagically updatable from a Github repository. The chroot of the OS is kept natively in git's format and fuse mounted with git-fs. Webconverger fulfills the Web kiosk use case, using Firefox and competes indirectly with Google Chrome OS. Chrome OS also has an autoupdate feature, however not as powerful, unified & transparent as when simply using git."

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arg by Blymie · 2012-10-09 05:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

They describe it as "automagic", SO I HAVE NO #$%&*(*+&% INTEREST IN IT!
Ever! Arg!
1. Re:arg by oodaloop · 2012-10-09 05:05 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  You're missing a close paren (a worse crime than using "automagically".
  
  --
  Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
2. Re:arg by Fwipp · 2012-10-09 05:14 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It's designed for web kiosks, like the kind you see in libraries. It's not for power Linux users. It's for a "set-up-and-forget" installation where everything just works, and magically stays updated and patched.
3. Re:arg by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-09 05:32 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Command-line is a user-interface.
4. Re:arg by bWareiWare.co.uk · 2012-10-09 05:48 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  Except that you are managing highly interdependent binary files (executable and libraries) which you can't merge in any useful way. With a large percentage of changes being security related so the goal is never to simply role back to previous versions.
  Yes managing the dependencies that result form allowing people to choose different programs and libraries and even the versions they prefer is an incredibly difficult task. Lucky the are several brilliant systems already available.
5. Re:arg by Andy+Dodd · 2012-10-09 06:11 · Score: 2
  
  git is a great tool, however it is extremely poorly suited for handling binary files in the way this project is using.
  The CyanogenMod project recently encountered issues with getting locked out of some repos temporarily because they were simply too big and driving too much traffic - in almost all cases, the culprits were device trees that contained prebuilt kernel binaries instead of using the inline kernel building process that has been strongly encouraged for quite some time.
  As a result of the most recent lockout issues, placement of prebuilt kernel binaries in the device tree has gone from "strongly discouraged" to "banned".
  
  --
  retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
6. Re:arg by mcgrew · 2012-10-09 06:45 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  It always amazes me how often and fiercely the Linux crowd equates banging one's head against the wall with "understanding", "willingness to learn", "freedom", or most laughable of all, "power".
  Odd, the only time I feel like banging my head agaisnt the wall is in Windows. It took months to figure out how to disable the retarded "tap to click" on my notebook. When I installed Linux on it it took five minutes. Windows had it in some icon at the bottom right of the screen you had to click to get to the icon where you could actually disable it, and it was buried half a dozen menus down, rather than being in the "mouse" function in Control Panel where it belonged. In Linux, it was in KDE's version of Control panel, in the mouse settings, three clicks and done.
  It's bad ideas, half implemented, and hastily shipped off to the masses. Lather, rinse, repeat.
  
  That's Windows, not Linux. Example: Vista, W8.
  It's very rare to see solidly good ideas advanced in the Linux world
  Rare? What solidly good ideas has MS ever come up with? OTOH in Linux I can set it up to boot to a default user and enter your user password for you (as long as it's not root). Why can't Windows do that? And not only am I logged onto the machine and network, all the apps and documents that were open when I shut it down are reopened. Why can't Windows do that? I can have movies as wallpaper, why can't Windows do that? Audacity lists lyrics of songs while they're played, downloaded from the internet. Why can't Windows Media Player do that?
  Moronic "If it's not hard it's not good!"
  Ah, I see... I was going to accuse you of shilling, but I'm pretty sure you're not, but tried some flavor of Linux (probably Red Hat or Debian) and couldn't find the C: drive. Your problem is your youth. Us geezers are used to unfamiliar operating systems; starting with BASIC, moviong up to DOS, then Windows... then Linux.
  Linux is far easier to use than Windows and does far more, is more stable, faster, more secure... Windows can't hold a candle to it. But then, Microsoft is a single company and Linux is many different companies and private developers, far more than MS could afford to hire (because the stockholders would be up in arms).
  Linux is Burger King: have it your way. Windows is McDonald's: you get it how we make it and you'll LIKE IT, serf!
  
  --
  Free Martian Whores!
7. Re:arg by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-09 06:48 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Thanks, I was already running low on stack space.
8. Re:arg by F.Ultra · 2012-10-09 09:57 · Score: 2
  
  You have to play around with the registry, but there are 3d party applications available that does it. We used it in a previous work place to auto log in to NT machines since all the services we ran there was normal desktop applications and not windows services.
9. Re:arg by paulatz · 2012-10-09 10:59 · Score: 2
  i agree that git is a great tool, especially when i do not have to use it; as Linus Torvalds put it, git stands for:
  
  “Global information tracker”: you’re in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing and light suddenly fills the room.
  
  “Goddamn idiot truckload of sh*t”: when it breaks.
  One specific use of git that i love, and where you never have to touch git at all, is SparkleShare, granted that i self host it in a mini NAS
  --
  this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
Yet Another... by msobkow · 2012-10-09 05:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

Yet Another Update Manager.
Replacing one transport with another isn't innovative enough to warrant the attention. You could use torrents under YUM or APT, you could use GIT, SVN, or any of a number of change management tools as a means to tell the client which updates to subscribe to and install.
But I doubt any such approach will ever see critical mass, just because the two big players (Debian/Ubuntu and RedHat/RHEL) already have perfectly usable tools. You'd need some serious whizz-bang new features to justify changing those tools, and the article doesn't suggest anything that can't be done already with existing technology.
Change for the sake of change is pointless; there has to be a benefit big enough to justify the change, and I don't see that in the write-up.

--
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Git is not that clever, yet by faragon · 2012-10-09 05:21 · Score: 2
Chrome OS also has an autoupdate feature, however not as powerful, unified & transparent as when simply using git.
"clever" differential updates usually work this way (Chrome browser uses it or used it back in the day):
- Unpacked blob version 1.
- Packed blob version 1
- Unpacked blob version 2.
- Packed blob version 2.
- Differential packed blobl version 2, taking version 1 as compression base dictionary (or any other differential scheme).
And Git has can not do that yet, because it uses diff + deflate, having far less scope than, e.g. LZMA with 500MB dictionary (requiring 5GB of memory for compressing it is acceptable if it is done just once per version).
Re:Security? by fph+il+quozientatore · 2012-10-09 05:28 · Score: 2

Uhm, and how is it any worse than in every other major distribution or operating system?

--
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Re:Security? by DraQ · 2012-10-09 05:31 · Score: 2

Commits can be signed and verified ?
The Dam Tour. by 0100010001010011 · 2012-10-09 05:36 · Score: 4, Funny

My company is migrating to git for all of our versioning control. I got to be the person to fly to the UK and get everyone up to speed on it. I knew it was British slang but not the full connotation of such.
I think you Brits need to make the next generation versioning system and call it fucker/bastard just to get us back.
I couldn't imaging standing up in front of my managers manager. "Well yeah, we're moving to bastard next. Bastards not too hard to use. You just type 'bastard clone'...."
1. Re:The Dam Tour. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-09 06:00 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  By the way GIT was developed by Linus Torvalds and he's Swedish, so it's not the USA we'd have to 'get back'.
  He's Finnish, not Swedish.
Re:Security? by laffer1 · 2012-10-09 06:09 · Score: 2

Git has integrity checking built into it already, presuming you trust the source. The only way this can happen is if someone gets access to the git repository and commits malicious code. No project is safe from that case.

--
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Everyone fails to get the WTF :( by tibit · 2012-10-09 06:11 · Score: 2

It's sad that no one picked up on the IMHO biggest snafu: the chroot is mounted using git-fs. Performance-wise it'll suck donkey balls just because of that. Just think of it: every page mapping for those executables has to go through userspace! Whoever thought of that was a real whiz, sigh.
If I were serious about it, I'd work on getting gitfs implemented natively in the kernel. Using fuse could be a proof-of-concept while the kernel driver is being implemented. I just hope that git stores its database with files still being files, because at least then the kernel driver could be, pretty much a filter driver that only rewrites file paths. Otherwise it'll have to be a full-blown filesystem driver with all the inefficiencies of using what amounts to multiple loop devices as its backend.

--
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Re:Just tried it in a VM - doesn't work by Crimey+McBiggles · 2012-10-09 06:22 · Score: 2

Nevermind, set memory to 1GB, works.

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Crimey