June Newspost

posted on 2020-06-17

This will be an active month for Carbs as major changes to the base and the package manager will be coming up.

Statically linking the base

For the past couple of weeks I have been trying to simplify the base and statically link the core (mostly binaries rather than libraries). I usually see some people extremely opposed to static linking as I also see the opposite on people.

I believe that binaries on the core should always be linked statically. This ensures that an SONAME bump to libObscure.so will not break the core functionality of your system, forcing you to use external resources to recover from such an issue. As long as you can compile, use core utilities, edit text, and access the web, you can solve any given issue on your system.

However, I don't think that removing shared libraries is sensible either. Not every piece of software out there is good quality enough to be statically linked.

Major changes on the core repository

There have been drastic changes to the core repository and the base rootfs this month (with more on the way). Right now changes are as follows.

Removed from Core

  • git
  • libressl
  • grub
  • bison
  • dhcpcd
  • ubase

Added to Core

  • bearssl, as a libressl replacement
  • byacc, as a bison replacement

Statically linked

  • kiss
  • neatvi
  • mandoc
  • byacc
  • m4
  • e2fsprogs
  • make
  • pkgconf
  • sbase
  • libnl
  • wpa_supplicant
  • bearssl

Making the wiki available offline

Soon, all documentation regarding Carbs Linux will be avaialable to be installed from the core repository in a carbs-docs package along with its own document crawler. Currently, the documentation regarding the installation process is a little outdated which will also receive some important updates.

ISO image for Carbs

I am thinking of releasing an ISO image in order to provide a standardized environment for installation along with installation helper tools in the spirit of arch-install-scripts. Let's see how that's going to play out.