Top all-time · #9765
Jonathan Perkin
Personal blog · perkin.org.uk/postssystemsprogramming
Jonathan Perkin's personal blog at perkin.org.uk covers systems and programming. Since 2012, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 23 times, most often “SmartOS and the Global Zone”. The last post was in 2015, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Jonathan Perkin's blog covers pkgsrc packaging, Solaris and illumos history, SmartOS, and binary packages for macOS. HN readers cite it for package-management and Unix-history topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Sofware engineer. Musician. Husband, father, child of God. This is my website.
Most-linked posts?
- SmartOS and the Global Zone3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-11-23
- Building packages at scale2 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2014-10-06
What Hacker News says?
Thank you for being "discrete" as asked in the last paragraph from 1986. That was a good read. Although less extreme, Solaris multiarch was not exactly always a picnic. From when it started becoming a lot less insane: https://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/multiarch-package-support-in...
Comment linking /posts/multiarch-package-support-in-smartos.html
on “The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris”Submitted 9000 up-to-date binary packages for OS X as a story · 28 points
HN discussion"I can't see ever switching to SmartOS unless it had a vibrant packaging community" SmartOS has close to 15,000 packages and growing[1], because it uses NetBSD's pkgsrc, which is also used by FreeBSD. Since the Joyent engineer responsible for this is also a pkgsrc developer, pkgsrc now has full upstream support for illumos / Solaris based operating systems. It also means that SmartOS has full access to FreeBSD's sof…
Comment linking /posts/building-packages-at-scale.html
on “Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks”Submitted Building packages at scale as a story · 19 points
HN discussionThis is the work of Jonathan Perkin (from joyent): http://www.perkin.org.uk/ It's great. It really is. I never understood why it's not used by more people. Homebrew is simply awful.
Comment linking /
on “Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac”Submitted SmartOS and the Global Zone as a story · 11 points
HN discussion> Like SmartOS not having a large binary footprint, and not having the excellent package repositories. http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.ht... > And the fact that KVM is from linux. Actually that's great that it's from Linux, because one major point of embarrassment for Linux is that KVM runs faster and better on SmartOS than it does on Linux, because Joyent engineers systematically used DTra…
Comment linking /posts/building-packages-at-scale.html
on “Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source”Submitted SmartOS and the global zone as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> I'm struck by how much this sounds like a Linux fan ranting back in 1995, when Windows and "real" UNIX was king. The underdog rants were rampant back then (I'm sure I penned a few of them myself). It sounds like a Linux fan ranting circa 1995 because that is precisely what it is: first came the rants. Then a small, underdog company named "redhat" started providing regular builds and support, while Linux was easily…
Comment linking /posts/building-packages-at-scale.html
on “Show HN: BitKeeper – Enterprise-ready version control, now open-source”Submitted 7,000 binary packages for OSX Lion as a story · 2 points
HN discussionillumos has the fault management architecture, SMF, and ZFS. I'm not interested in running this computer as a desktop, but as a UNIX server which I can carry in my pocket. As for software, the package library of illumos based systems can stand shoulder to shoulder with Debian based ones: http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/building-packages-at-scale.ht... Linux on these types of devices is not interesting to me, as every…
Comment linking /posts/building-packages-at-scale.html
on “CHIP $9 Computer”Submitted Tweaking the SmartOS global zone as a story · 2 points
HN discussioni agree that most people don't want to bother with mailing lists and/or IRC these days, though there are a couple of alternative options https://www.perkin.org.uk/pages/pkgsrc-binary-packages-for-o... https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc https://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/sendpr.cgi?gndb=netbsd https://pkgsrc.se/net/py-awscli
Comment linking /pages/pkgsrc-binary-packages-for-osx.html
on “Ask HN: Best Alternative to Homebrew in 2021?”Submitted A node.js-powered 8-bit CPU as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIf I need to run Linux software, I can use an lx-branded zone inside of SmartOS, and run at the speed of bare metal while having ZFS, mdb, kdb, dbx and DTrace, CPU-bursting, and change kernel schedulers on the fly. But then, as I am about to run Linux software inside of an lx-branded zone on SmartOS, I realize that SmartOS has 15,000 packages, with most the of the software I would have run on Linux, available native…
Comment linking /posts/building-packages-at-scale.html
on “LXD 2.0: Introduction to LXD”Submitted Create VirtualBox VM from the command line as a story · 0 points
HN discussionAs I wrote previously, the question is for the founder of Docker and him alone, but since you volunteered your opinion, I am extremely pleased to inform you that I love making OS packages and performing configuration management at scale that way. I especially enjoy being able to ask the operating system's software management subsystem exactly which configuration changes have been done to it, and get a precise respon…
Comment linking /posts/building-packages-at-scale.html
on “Running containers without Docker”> They would be eating Linux's lunch if they were used in any wider scale. Linux took 20 years to make its way into the enterprises, and well, SmartOS has to start somewhere. We are only at the beginning of the journey, but with one major difference: unlike Linux, which is still maturing, an illumos based operating environment has 37 years of enterprise abuse and hardening behind it. > A primary objection to Solaris…
Comment linking /posts/building-packages-at-scale.html
on “Understanding and Hardening Linux Containers [pdf]”Briefly: * Between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, Oracle bought Sun and killed the open source efforts known as OpenSolaris. illumos started from the final open source bits of what eventually became Solaris 11 and has now significantly diverged. Solaris is effectively dead, illumos is very much alive. * There are a number of illumos "forks", of which SmartOS is ours, but all forks still share the common illumos code (we…
Comment linking /posts/smartos-and-the-global-zone.html
on “SmartDataCenter and Manta are now open source”I didn't ask for it, but I love the clues you drop... "TIS-100"? "Xonotic"? My interest is further piqued, now I have to go and research... Apropos Qt, it is not for the faint of heart: even on platforms it officially supports, it is very hard to build, at least it was last I had to do it professionally, back in 2013. Qt is really unprofessional as a product, I remember it involved a lot of hacking and coercion of t…
Comment linking /posts/whats-new-in-pkgsrc-2013Q2.html
on “Bus1: a new Linux interprocess communication proposal”Packaging software and software updates. SmartOS uses NetBSD's pkgsrc, which is an interesting choice given the fact that BSDs have a very bad track record for packaging. FreeBSD still doesn't package their base system, and the recommended way of dealing with software on BSD systems is to compile it from source. Compiling from source? pkgsrc, and by extension SmartOS, fully supports installing binary packages. The c…
Comment linking /posts/building-packages-at-scale.html
on “Docker Storage: An Introduction”I already have a blog post on that ;) http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/creating-local-smartos-packag... You'll just need to tweak paths from /opt/local (SmartOS) to /usr/pkg (OSX). The one caveat is that multiple repository support in pkgin is not great right now. It should be ok as long as your site-specific packages are separate from the rest, and have unique names etc. This is something we hope will be fixed during…
Comment linking /posts/creating-local-smartos-packages.html
on “9000 up-to-date binary packages for OS X”