|
|
|
|
|
|
by q66
917 days ago
|
|
|
musl is just a mandatory choice; the toolchain configuration doesn't really allow running anything else (glibc doesn't go together with clang+compiler-rt, they only very recently made it build with clang and that's still assuming a gcc-centric runtime as glibc actually dlopens libgcc_s, and every other libc is going to be much worse in terms of support) i think you overstate how much trouble it is to port software to it; most software does not involve any porting in the first place, upstreams are not that reluctant, and as for firefox having a specific crash, have you reported it? slowness is typically a default allocator issue and that does not apply to us (in fact, it may sometimes be faster) |
|
|
> musl is just a mandatory choice [due to the toolchain]
interesting; i didn't realise that.
> most software does not involve any porting in the first place, upstreams are not that reluctant
perhaps; it seems to me that the majority of patches in alpine's aports (otherwise a rather vanilla distribution) are fixing glibc assumptions.
> as for firefox having a specific crash, have you reported it?
as i understand it, mozilla wouldn't accept a musl-specific bug report; and neither the old nor new alpine firefox maintainers were able to reproduce these two crashes, weirdly enough, so i gave up and started using the upstream build, hence using this as an example of a musl (or non-bog-standard-gnu-tooclhain at any rate; at least one of these crashes seem to be on a c++/rust boundary) annoyance.
> slowness is typically a default allocator issue and that does not apply to us
i didn't know about your using a different allocator either. i'll investigate.
to end on a more positive note, from the end-user point of view there are also some joys to having an incompatible userland: in principle, not being able to natively run upstream builds prepares me for when i decide to jump ship to e.g. arm or riscv.
i had a few nice 'aha' moments: i switched to a different music streaming service because the old one wanted widevine which wouldn't work in a musl build of firefox; a random electron app i downloaded, unpacked and ran with distribution-provided electron (assuming it's just a bunch of html and javascript) didn't work because it shipped, amid other resources, shared libraries (with filenames helpfully ending in '.node').