Overte VS coreutils

Overte is an Open Source desktop/VR platform similar to VR Chat or Resonite.

Unlike most other similar platforms, we follow a very distributed model. We don't have a walled garden users must log into, instead the architecture is reminiscent of a 3D webserver -- anyone can deploy the server anywhere in a few minutes, and connect to it.

We don't monetize anything, collect data, or deal with cryptocurrency or NFTs.

The grant will be used to modernize the rendering engine, build system, audio system, and make some other improvements:

https://overte.org/#we-ve-obtained-an-nlnet-grant

That looks amazing!

If you'd ever like to see it in VR, we run an open source desktop/VR social platform at https://overte.org/

It shouldn't be too hard to set up a server and take a walk among the past.

Sure.

High Fidelity, sort of. Failed commercial project to develop a sort of VR world from the same guy that made Second Life. Their advertising honestly cheesed me off and seemed to reek of desperation. Their adoption of cryptocurrency didn't help either. What did was that despite that they had promising technology people I knew talked about, so I did check it out despite all my initial misgivings, and it was good enough for me to stick around there for a good while. When they gave up, I was part of the group of people that tried to keep things going, which eventually became a non-profit I'm now a member of, https://overte.org/

Resonite. The new version of NeosVR, still in development. Happened after an ideological split. I heard of NeosVR mostly from Reddit discussion and friends who love the system.

Linux Weekly News. Only news site I pay for, they post interesting highly technical information. Pretty sure I heard them mentioned in Linux discussion spaces.

Linode -- Same deal, Linux users that use their services. Now it's much bigger, I signed up back in the early days, back when they used User-mode Linux, and had no SSDs.

Oh, I mean we started a non-profit to support our particular project (https://overte.org/), not that we've got a general purpose organization providing service to whoever needs it.

So I'm not sure we're we're a good fit, in that we're neither something comparable to Code Shelter, nor unmaintained.

I think it's an unfortunate necessity for some kinds of applications.

Eg, we make this: https://overte.org/

We're currently using AppImage because that was the first thing that worked for us, but most of the reasons are the same either way: We want to spend time developing the software, and that means it's hard to justify packaging every release for a dozen distributions. And I'd say nobody particularly wants to do it.

We also expect our users to keep reasonably up to date, not whenever it's convenient to the distribution. Code changes can change the networking protocol, and some of those can require everyone to upgrade.

So at least to me it makes perfect sense to package some kinds of applications this way. Maybe not KDE's calculator, but definitely things like games and tools with specialized markets, where it may be difficult to find people wanting to do the work of packaging them for a distribution.

It's probably something we (https://overte.org/) can use.

We have a 3D environment with spatial audio. Audio is encoded server-side, and since it's spatial everyone needs their own mix. We're using Opus, and audio encoding turns out to be the usual limiting factor on small servers.

So this kind of thing is exactly up our alley: an alternate option that uses less CPU than Opus, but consumes less bandwidth than raw audio.

But adding supporting for FLAC is also on our list. It seems nicely performant when compared to Opus.

Philip Rosedale (the Second Life guy) after a while left the company and started something called High Fidelity. That was something like SL 2.0 design-wise and was built with VR support from the start. This also died eventually and got picked up by volunteers, which is what I do now :)

More practically, I currently work on a former commercial project that was luckily open source. Thanks to that, we can keep it going!

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/fcfba90d0d27a1...

A summary of other changes just released in GNU coreutils 9.5 are:

* mv accepts --exchange to swap files

> some are simple like yes(1)

Not that simple: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c

The -S / --split-string option[1] of /usr/bin/env is a relatively recent addition to GNU Coreutils. It's available starting from GNU Coreutils 8.30[2], released on 2018-07-01.

Beware of portability: it relies on a non-standard behavior from some operating systems. It only works for OS's that treat all the text after the first space as argument(s) to the shebanged executable; rather than just treating the whole string as an executable path (that can happen to contain spaces).

Fortunately this non-standard behavior is more the norm than the exception: it works at least on modern GNU/Linux, BSDs, and macOS.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/env-...

[2] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/b09dc6306e7affaf...

> building a cat from scratch

> That would be an interesting project.

Here is the source code of the OpenBSD implementation of cat:

> https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/cat/cat.c

and here of the GNU coreutils implementation:

> https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c

Thus: I don't think building a cat from scratch or creating a tutorial about that topic is particularly hard (even though the HN audience would likely be interested in it). :-)

the yes command, writing to /dev/null, is making IO calls, which interfere with predictable scheduling.

If you look at the source code for yes, https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c

it builds a buffer of output and then writes that in a for loop

  while (full_write (STDOUT_FILENO, buf, bufused) == bufused)

Looking at the source of nohup, if the execvp() of the child happens then it _must_ have already done the signal (SIGHUP, SIG_IGN) so - WTF?

This got me wondering so I went and looked and it seems like lo and behold there was actually a commit to the GNU ls source just 2 weeks ago.

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/ls.c

"maint: prefer char32_t to wchar_t"

even an empty file? Yes. so now it was a file with a copyright disclaimer and nothing else. And the koan-like question comes to mind is "Can you copyright nothing?" well AT&T sure tried.

Then somebody said our programs should be well defined and not depend on a fluke of unix, which at this point was probable a good idea. so it became "exit 0"

Then somebody said we should write our system utilities in C instead of shell so it runs faster. openbsd still has a good example of how this would look.

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr....

At some point gnu bureaucracy got involved and said all programs must support the '-h' flag. so that got added, then they said all programs must support locale so that got added. now days gnu true is an astonishing 80 lines long.

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true....

http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html

> Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists.

Why would it be a strong word? Here it is, in src/ls.c: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils

It is then packaged by tens of operating system distributions, who themselves maintain extra patchsets, some of which are then upstreamed.

It is installed and used on millions (billions?) of devices, for 3 decades.

It's a very reliable and trusty "sharp stick of metal" :)