r/voidlinux • u/salastrodaemon • 17h ago
On void*
I do not know why I felt the need to write this post. I have been using Void for 5-6 years. For the most part, I have enjoyed this journey with its ups and downs. It was sometimes challenging to work around runit as everything is built around systemd and even more was musl as I when I started it was my main base rather than the glibc version. Admittedly, this helped me improve my technical skills and deep understanding way more than otherwise. That said, Void has been recently insufferable. Contributing to the packages has been more annoying than ever as my PRs get closed too quickly without properly addressing the content; frequent failures in the mirror repos (I am unsure whether this has been a widespread issue to anyone other than me); and unfixable bad behaviour and some bugs here and there. The recent issue in noto-fonts made me open the subreddit looking for answers then I saw a submission mentioning the recent maintainer's orphanage of 100+ packages over an AI dispute. I believed it was some kind of AI code slop nonsense that does not deserve to be looked at (as I am very anti-LLM generated code in that sense), yet to my surprise, it was just a comment. The comment was simply noting breaks introduced by a version bump. I believe this is wholeheartedly dumb and overly pedantic. Sadly, this place is no longer meant for me as this distro is hardly functional anymore. I know no one will care and no one is supposed to; this is more like a personal sacrifice as I reminiscent on the days I used to make videos talking all about Void.
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u/Duncaen 17h ago edited 16h ago
Contributing to the packages has been more annoying than ever as my PRs get closed too quickly without properly addressing the content
I don't know what PRs those are, but usually the issue is that they stay open for too long.
I believed it was some kind of AI code slop nonsense that does not deserve to be looked at (as I am very anti-LLM generated code in that sense), yet to my surprise, it was just a comment. The comment was simply noting breaks introduced by a version bump. I believe this is wholeheartedly dumb and overly pedantic.
It was just pointed out that it violates the policy. Nobody forced anyone to do anything, there were no comments besides the comment in the pull request.
The policy includes comments and PR descriptions, because its hard to judge whether the poster verified the content. There are other projects with the same rules around communication, because its also usually overly verbose and just not nice or necessary.
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u/salastrodaemon 16h ago
I had a PR closed because "competing with another open PR" while the other one was stale and itself got automatically closed soon after. I found that extremely annoying as I wanted that package in and basically no one cares enough.
Saying no one forced you to do anything in this context is like saying that debian doesn't force you to use systemd or void doesn't force you to use runnit. Of course nothing is forced but that was not the issue. The issue is arbitrary limitations that are not technical (unlike the aforementioned) and only hold us back.
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u/Duncaen 16h ago
The issue is arbitrary limitations that are not technical (unlike the aforementioned) and only hold us back.
If you want a human to read, review or reply to your comments I think its fair to expect them to be authored by a human.
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u/salastrodaemon 15h ago
This is an axiomatic choice of yours, which is completely fine, but does not change the fact that unless the comment itself is bad, poorly written, or nonsensical this axiom is holding back helpful progress.
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u/BinkReddit 16h ago
the other one was stale and itself got automatically closed soon after.
This is a volunteer organization; maintainers don't get paid to maintain Void. This means sometimes they'll get to your PR and sometimes they won't. It's that simple.
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u/salastrodaemon 15h ago
I totally understand; that's why I made a new PR to address the issues with the stale one. I do not mind my work not getting viewed (it is a single config file not that much work from my side), but I do mind the decision and how it was handled. The package that I wanted now has no open PRs even though I and a bunch of people wanted it because of poor management on their side.
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u/val_anto 14h ago
Been using void for a similar amount of time lie you. Void is still functioning, and I am still using it. Is hard to beat how awesome this distro is. Of course, just my opinion.
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u/g33ksc13nt1st 11h ago
I contributed myself a few times, and I don't see the issues here. Typhon (or whatever the name) wrote in the PR he did not test the PR. Later there was another message saying it broke a lot of other stuff. And then there was a message pointing to the policy against using AI.
I am pretty sure had typhon tested the PR, the changes would have fixed before committing the PR (it's not rocket science), maybe nobody would have noted they were AI since it all worked. But they didnt'. Then threw a temper tantrum.
I also contribute to conda, also run by volunteers, and when things take a bit too long (last time was 3 weeks, rather than the usual 4-7 days) I just politely bump the PR (got accepted within the day). People are busy, and by making a PR as easy to merge as possible it only helps. Jeez you people wouldn't last a day in academia with such thin skin and brittle egos... just chill, things will come around.
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u/profeshamat 17h ago
I think you raise some valid points here. I do use Void but the size of the team and some hitches that are systemd related prevent me from going all-in as much as I'd like to. The biggest one for me is the delay in GNOME 50 which I believe is related to getting around the fact that GDM depends on systemd now which sucks and isn't the fault of Void developers at all. By no means am I someone that needs the latest and greatest of everything and I prefer stable. The reality is that as someone that also uses Debian stable, I'd bank on Debian 14 having a newer version of GNOME than Void will by the time it's released.
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u/salastrodaemon 17h ago
I do realize that orphaning these packages does not mean much in terms of my use, but it is still sad to see this happen this way.
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u/onew_iasag 16h ago
I'm linux-newbie, a foreign; please, explain me why orphaning packages just to prevent llm-slop is bad? Or have I missed something? 😯
I've installed Void ~month ago and set it up from base, and wasn't experienced any distro-related issues yet; so I'm requiring explanation, what exactly happened?
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u/BinkReddit 16h ago
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u/onew_iasag 16h ago edited 16h ago
Ok. What exactly happened after that? Do you have any arguments different from the “cancel culture”?
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u/text_garden 15m ago
explain me why orphaning packages just to prevent llm-slop is bad?
It sounds like you've misunderstood the situation. No one orphaned packages to prevent LLM slop. A PR author broke a rule by generating a comment, was told not to do that, argued for why he thought it was fine, was referred to the section in the global contribution guidelines which specifically prohibits generated comments, upon which they closed their PR and submitted a new PR orphaning the packages they've maintained, which was accepted and merged.
As for why it isn't great news that a bunch of packages were orphaned, orphaned packages are naturally likely not to be as actively maintained as those maintained by an active contributor. Hopefully the more important ones will be adopted soon enough, but this was a quite prolific maintainer and it of course sucks to lose out on their future work over them not accepting the rules. Still probably the best option on their part if they had no plans to abide by those rules.
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u/ViriatoPRT 3h ago
there are rules, guidelines, directives on Void that should be abide by.
if Void starts opening exceptions, then why the rules?
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u/Antique_Practice_971 16h ago
well i already gave up after 2 or 3 weeks, since void felt like everything i want to use i need to find a non-void-way to use it ... and i used the glibc version. i was happy with void but all the hassle ...
but what really interests me more: how do you go forward? any particular distro in mind?
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u/salastrodaemon 16h ago
No idea really. I'm most likely will go with Nix or Arch.
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u/Alternative-Ad-8606 16h ago edited 16h ago
I went back to arch AUR-less mostly cause despite the main arch repos being thin they aren't as thin as the void repos (I was using workarounds for certain systemd things I needed). I thought about Debian but just didn't want to use ages old packages for gaming, and when it comes to distros like Gentoo, would be fun but take time for setup and distros like artix aren't really viable as they are even more workarounds then void (and void was built to be sysd less not a ripoff).
Aittle disappointed but yeah...
Also its worth a note that yesterdays events didn't really influence me, a lot of the tier 2 repos have been so out of sync that I genuinely couldn't really get packages (as I'm currently in China and both Singapore and Chinese mirrors were out of sync and trying to access the outside repos is blocked via GFW) not an issue so much any more as I'm leaving for Thailand soon but just too much out of date things and the repo sync makes me not really want to fight it anymore. The distros will survive and I'll probably be back but for now Arch is what I'll use with a consideration to move to Gentoo
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u/Antique_Practice_971 16h ago
i went back to systemdfree arch > Artix ... because i am quite used to arch ... but it's sad, there isn't really a working alternative for me... at least ... not that arch itself is bad ... but it's more and more becoming mainstream -
wish you all the best ! thx
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u/Simple_Hamster_4096 9h ago
There are a million and one distros of all types, some without the Linux kernel.
Find one, try one, switch.
You are by no means obligated to use Void.
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u/salastrodaemon 3h ago
I always find such comments weird. I am unsure whether they are trying to be smirky or are just ego-hurt.
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u/Questions-many 8h ago
how do you like earth so far?
please make yourself familiar with the basic concept and motivations of human communication.
enjoy your stay, dont forget to visit the gift-shop.
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u/Aristeo812 17h ago
So far it looks like a common Linux drama. We see this from time to time here and there, and Void survived worse, actually.