• 0 Posts
  • 35 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle





  • TheOneCurly@lemmy.theonecurly.pagetoLinux@lemmy.mlZorin OS 17 Has Arrived
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    I disagree. Each distro is a user of a thousand different open source systems. When a distro developer integrates gnome, systemd, bluez, or whatever other system they’re finding, reporting, and possibly fixing bugs that end users might miss. Other than arch users, who else is compiling these things from scratch and really digging into the documentation?




  • Doing this by hand is challenging but possible.

    First you need a hex editor, not a text editor. xxd on linux will get you started but you might want something a little more user friendly.

    Then look for a label for a value you know, xxd and other hex editors will show ascii text on the side. Hopefully you’ll be able to identify the value (in hexadecimal, probably 4 bytes but could be 1, 2, or 8 as well) somewhere before or after the label. You might have to get familiar with endianness, two’s compliment, and binary floating point before the numbers make sense.

    Once you know how to read a value after a label you’ll need to find some label for the information you don’t know. If it isn’t displayed in the program it might not have a super readable label.












  • So when Bluesky introduces a new feature or a breaking change in the protocol anyone downstream will find out when it gets pushed, maybe a little ahead of time when it comes in as a pull request. Bluesky goes live with the change immediately, maybe in a public beta channel, maybe straight to prod, depending on their testing setup. Anyone running a bluesky compatible server becomes immediately incompatible until they rush to implement the new changes. The best user experience will be had on first party servers, driving the vast majority of users there.

    For a standard defined protocol, like ActivityPub for example, to introduce a change like that it would first go to the standards comittee where it would be discussed publically with stakeholders. The changes would be published and then all parties would begin implementations at a pace that makes sense to them. It’s like when you hear about new Wi-Fi versions several years before any devices actually support them. One group doesn’t just get to come out with some crazy new change that everyone else has to reverse engineer and then race to keep up.

    What Bluesky is doing might be fine and make sense for their model, whatever that may be. I just want to point out that there is a difference and it drastically changes what the future of the service will look like.