Hello, Gentoo.

I got a nasty shock earlier on this evening when I was updating my
(still newish) system. Around (perhaps) 70 packages to be updated or
reloaded, several of them big packages. What's going on?

There were lots of qt and kde packages being sucked in. But what stood
out prominently was the wayland USE flag, which appeared to have been
enabled in most of these packages.

What on Earth is going on? I never asked for wayland, and I haven't
received any news items about it in the last few weeks. I know little
about this X substitute, but one thing's vitually certain; that
installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of breakage.

So I disabled the wayland USE flag in my make.conf, and the number of
packages to merge went down to 29. I merged them.

I'm hoping my machine is still stable. It would have been nice to have
got a news item about this change. :-(

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

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On 23/09/2024 21:14, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

What on Earth is going on? I never asked for wayland, and I haven't
received any news items about it in the last few weeks. I know little
about this X substitute, but one thing's vitually certain; that
installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of breakage.

Well, everything is slowly moving to Wayland, or X13 as they didn't call
it. And while I don't understand the details, X Org is basically dead.

X comes in two halves, the front end (or server, they use the words the
other way round to normal), which is still maintained. And the back end,
or client, that drives the hardware - this bit is basically abandonware
apart from the Wayland compositor or whatever it is.

So put pretty simply, Wayland is fast becoming - if it isn't already - a
hard dependency of X11. But if you want to run X11 as your sole
windowing system, that's no problem, just run it over Wayland.

What makes you think that enabling Wayland will cause breakage? It
shouldn't really do anything much, other than allowing apps to access
Wayland features if they want. Given that both KDE/Plasma, and Gnome,
are moving to Wayland (and pretty much hide Wayland from you, just like
they hide X), I would have thought disabling Wayland was actually MORE
likely to cause breakage.

Not that your hardware/X combo is going to bitrot, but the apps you rely
on might start relying on Wayland and won't be happy if they can't find it.

(I'm cursing Plasma 6, but that's not Wayland's fault. afaict it's
having problems importing/updating the old Plasma 5 settings with the
result it resets itself every time I log in :-(

Cheers,
Wol

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Hello, Alan,

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

Hello, Gentoo.

I got a nasty shock earlier on this evening when I was updating my
(still newish) system. Around (perhaps) 70 packages to be updated or reloaded, several of them big packages. What's going on?

There were lots of qt and kde packages being sucked in. But what stood
out prominently was the wayland USE flag, which appeared to have been
enabled in most of these packages.

What on Earth is going on? I never asked for wayland, and I haven't
received any news items about it in the last few weeks. I know little
about this X substitute, but one thing's vitually certain; that
installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of breakage.

That should not be the case. If something breaks, that's a bug.

Wayland was added to the default USE of the desktop profiles because
most DE developers have started phasing out X11 support, or at least
treating it as second-class, and because enabling USE=wayland should
have no impact on those using the X session, as most/all Wayland support
is runtime-conditional.

So, that change agrees with developers of software we ship, while not
bringing our users much disadvantage. Hence it was enabled.

Hope that helps, have a lovely evening.
--
Arsen Arsenović

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Hello, Eli.

On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 17:11:14 -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote:

On 9/23/24 4:14 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

Hello, Gentoo.

I got a nasty shock earlier on this evening when I was updating my
(still newish) system. Around (perhaps) 70 packages to be updated or reloaded, several of them big packages. What's going on?

There were lots of qt and kde packages being sucked in. But what stood
out prominently was the wayland USE flag, which appeared to have been enabled in most of these packages.

What on Earth is going on? I never asked for wayland, and I haven't received any news items about it in the last few weeks. I know little about this X substitute, but one thing's vitually certain; that
installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of breakage.

Intriguing that you feel it is "vitally certain" it will lead to
breakage. Where do you derive that conclusion from?

It's a big change, wayland is known to be incompatible with X, as far as
I'm aware XFCE doesn't yet work with it, and there is no completely satisfactory version of Emacs which runs with wayland (I'm an Emacs
developer, and bugs keep coming in from people trying Emacs on wayland.)

To be sure, installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of recompiling and packages that you aren't using.

Yes.

That's the description of bloat, not the description of breakage.

Maybe so, but who wants bloat? There are binary distribution for such
people. ;-)

To be perfectly clear: both X and Wayland support can be and frequently
are compiled into the same program and/or the same toolkit. It kind of
needs to, because binary distros such as Arch, Debian, Fedora etc only provide one build, and that has to work for people using X, and it has
to work for people using Wayland.

OK, thanks. I didn't know that.

The resulting packages pull in support libraries that implement both technologies. This is (usually, absent dlopen tricks) a fundamental requirement of "ld.so", the runtime loader: if you compile support for
it, you have to have it installed.

But no code is *run*, because it is all conditional on a check that
looks like such:

#if defined(COMPILED_WITH_WAYLAND_SUPPORT)

if get_current_display_server_type() == 'wayland':
run_wayland_specific_code()

#elif defined(COMPILED_WITH_X_SUPPORT)

if get_current_display_server_type() == 'xorg':
run_xorg_specific_code()

#endif

OK.

Please note that no matter what display server you run, get_current_display_server_type() is the same function either way, so
you're not actually running any "wayland code" even if you check to see whether you are running wayland.

But the unused code still gets built in, doesn't it? That's a somewhat un-gentoo like situation.

But you do need to install the wayland libraries, since the body of the
if statement runs "wayland code". Unless you compile the package with USE="-wayland", which means that neither
get_current_display_server_type() nor run_wayland_specific_code() are compiled at all.

That's what I ended up doing.

In short, installing wayland will NOT break your X11 system and it is
rank paranoia to assume so or claim so.

Put yourself in my position, which wasn't one of knowledge. It's a
matter of decades of experience which suggest that big changes cause
breakage, just like throwing crockery onto the floor does.

But it will make you compile a bunch of stuff you don't want or need.
Surely, that is reason enough for you to make an informed choice about disabling USE flags that you do not need, rather than worrying about how Gentoo is broken all of a sudden?

That was kind of the point I was making. I had to guess which flag to
disable; I don't think it was in any documentation.

Do you have that little faith in the Gentoo Developers, that you think
we'd make a USE flag change that made everyone's systems suddenly break?

It happens, from time to time, by accident. For example, emerge
--depclean on my system wants to unmerge openrc. Not a deliberate move
by the developers, just some accident. But it's the reason I don't do
emerge --depclean, ever.

:(

So I disabled the wayland USE flag in my make.conf, and the number of packages to merge went down to 29. I merged them.

I'm hoping my machine is still stable. It would have been nice to have
got a news item about this change. :-(

Your machine was, is, and will continue to be stable. Please, relax. :)

Thanks!

News items are a better fit for scenarios where users are required to
take action. No one is required to take action here, though you may take action if you wish. There are lots of other things that don't require
action, but you may choose to take action over. Any system update can
update a package that you like, to a new upstream version that removes
your favorite features. Does there need to be a news item every time a package is updated?

I assure you you'd get quite sick and tired of the constant news items
if that actually happened.

OK, but this change appears to be dramatic, and likely to cause concern
to users. Most changes are much smaller, and can be emerged without
thought. But for something like switching on a contraversial package
like wayland, something which on my system would have caused lots of qt
and kde packages to be loaded (why?), a warning might not have gone
amiss.

P.S. Yes, I disabled the wayland USE as well. I'm not trying to push
wayland on you, don't worry.

:-)

--
Eli Schwartz

--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

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On 9/23/24 4:14 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

Hello, Gentoo.

I got a nasty shock earlier on this evening when I was updating my
(still newish) system. Around (perhaps) 70 packages to be updated or reloaded, several of them big packages. What's going on?

There were lots of qt and kde packages being sucked in. But what stood
out prominently was the wayland USE flag, which appeared to have been
enabled in most of these packages.

What on Earth is going on? I never asked for wayland, and I haven't
received any news items about it in the last few weeks. I know little
about this X substitute, but one thing's vitually certain; that
installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of breakage.

Intriguing that you feel it is "vitally certain" it will lead to
breakage. Where do you derive that conclusion from?

To be sure, installing it as emerge intended would lead to a lot of
recompiling and packages that you aren't using.

That's the description of bloat, not the description of breakage.

To be perfectly clear: both X and Wayland support can be and frequently
are compiled into the same program and/or the same toolkit. It kind of
needs to, because binary distros such as Arch, Debian, Fedora etc only
provide one build, and that has to work for people using X, and it has
to work for people using Wayland.

The resulting packages pull in support libraries that implement both technologies. This is (usually, absent dlopen tricks) a fundamental
requirement of "ld.so", the runtime loader: if you compile support for
it, you have to have it installed.

But no code is *run*, because it is all conditional on a check that
looks like such:


#if defined(COMPILED_WITH_WAYLAND_SUPPORT)

if get_current_display_server_type() == 'wayland':
run_wayland_specific_code()

#elif defined(COMPILED_WITH_X_SUPPORT)

if get_current_display_server_type() == 'xorg':
run_xorg_specific_code()

#endif


Please note that no matter what display server you run, get_current_display_server_type() is the same function either way, so
you're not actually running any "wayland code" even if you check to see
whether you are running wayland.


But you do need to install the wayland libraries, since the body of the
if statement runs "wayland code". Unless you compile the package with USE="-wayland", which means that neither
get_current_display_server_type() nor run_wayland_specific_code() are
compiled at all.

In short, installing wayland will NOT break your X11 system and it is
rank paranoia to assume so or claim so.

But it will make you compile a bunch of stuff you don't want or need.
Surely, that is reason enough for you to make an informed choice about disabling USE flags that you do not need, rather than worrying about how
Gentoo is broken all of a sudden?

Do you have that little faith in the Gentoo Developers, that you think
we'd make a USE flag change that made everyone's systems suddenly break?

:(

So I disabled the wayland USE flag in my make.conf, and the number of packages to merge went down to 29. I merged them.

I'm hoping my machine is still stable. It would have been nice to have
got a news item about this change. :-(

Your machine was, is, and will continue to be stable. Please, relax. :)

News items are a better fit for scenarios where users are required to
take action. No one is required to take action here, though you may take
action if you wish. There are lots of other things that don't require
action, but you may choose to take action over. Any system update can
update a package that you like, to a new upstream version that removes
your favorite features. Does there need to be a news item every time a
package is updated?

I assure you you'd get quite sick and tired of the constant news items
if that actually happened.


P.S. Yes, I disabled the wayland USE as well. I'm not trying to push
wayland on you, don't worry.



--
Eli Schwartz


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On 9/23/24 6:08 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

Do you have that little faith in the Gentoo Developers, that you think
we'd make a USE flag change that made everyone's systems suddenly break?

It happens, from time to time, by accident. For example, emerge
--depclean on my system wants to unmerge openrc. Not a deliberate move
by the developers, just some accident. But it's the reason I don't do
emerge --depclean, ever.

This should not generally be possible. The @system set contains virtual/service-manager, so you cannot depclean that.

$ emerge -pvc systemd

Calculating dependencies... done!
sys-apps/systemd-255.11 pulled in by:
[...]
virtual/service-manager-1-r2 requires sys-apps/systemd
[...]

$ emerge -pvc virtual/service-manager

Calculating dependencies... done!
virtual/service-manager-1-r2 pulled in by:
@system requires virtual/service-manager




And this works the same in an openrc chroot as well!

# emerge -pvc virtual/service-manager

Calculating dependencies... done!
virtual/service-manager-1-r2 pulled in by:
@system requires virtual/service-manager

# emerge -pvc openrc

Calculating dependencies... done!
sys-apps/openrc-0.54.2 pulled in by:
net-misc/netifrc-0.7.8-r1 requires >=sys-apps/openrc-0.15
virtual/service-manager-1-r2 requires sys-apps/openrc





It does that using an "any-of" dependency:

# cat /var/db/pkg/virtual/service-manager-1-r2/RDEPEND
|| ( sys-apps/openrc sys-apps/openrc-navi sys-apps/s6-rc
sys-apps/systemd sys-process/runit virtual/daemontools )


So, @system requires you to have any one of:

- openrc
- openrc-navi (a testing fork with openrc user services)
- s6
- systemd
- runit
- daemontools


It's possible you have installed another one of these packages too. If
you do, then virtual/service-manager will still be satisfied, and it
will allow you to depclean openrc.


In theory, one should not have multiple init systems installed. And
openrc is the preferred satisfier, so if you use `emerge --depclean` it
will try to depclean the other package, not openrc. But you can depclean
openrc itself in that case, since portage doesn't know which init system
you intend to keep.

Even in this case it emits a warning:

!!! 'sys-apps/openrc' (virtual/service-manager) is part of your system
profile.
!!! Unmerging it may be damaging to your system.


to make sure you are fully aware that you intend to depclean a package
that *might* be the wrong one.


--
Eli Schwartz


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Wol:
...

X comes in two halves, the front end (or server, they use the words the
other way round to normal),

...

No, server is a software concept, a program that waits and responds to
inbound calls, the X-server is just that. A client is a program/user
that pokes at the server and get responses.

It's just the pc hoard that thinks a server is some machine handling
databases, mail, files, printers or whatever.

It has noting to do with what is there or here.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar

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On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 5:11 PM Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@gentoo.org> wrote:

The resulting packages pull in support libraries that implement both technologies. This is (usually, absent dlopen tricks) a fundamental requirement of "ld.so", the runtime loader: if you compile support for
it, you have to have it installed.

I run a lean X system for desktop workflows, with USE="-wayland".
Every unconditional dev-libs/wayland dependency I've encountered has
used dlopen. These were proprietary binary applications like Zoom and
Slack. On an X system, they work completely fine without
dev-libs/wayland, though. If I remember correctly, the word was,
"Upstream says it's a dependency, so it's a dependency.".

The moral of that story is, an unconditional dependency on Wayland
*does not mean* that it isn't fully functional without
dev-libs/wayland.

On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 5:20 PM Wol <antlists@youngman.org.uk> wrote:

So put pretty simply, Wayland is fast becoming - if it isn't already - a
hard dependency of X11. But if you want to run X11 as your sole
windowing system, that's no problem, just run it over Wayland.

I run a four-monitor system using NVIDIA's closed-source drivers. Last
I heard, Wayland did not work with such a combination. Has that
changed?

-MD

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On 24/9/24 10:52, Mitchell Dorrell wrote:

I run a four-monitor system using NVIDIA's closed-source drivers. Last
I heard, Wayland did not work with such a combination. Has that
changed?

I run several 3-monitor NVIDIA setups on Wayland with no issue.

One of my 4-monitor setups has one screen plugged into
an intel iGPU port, so I can't say for sure that 4 plugged
into a single Nvidia card work, however I can say that
driving 4 screens total (or 3x2k@144Hz) isn't a problem
for devolopment and even gaming if the hardware is otherwise
capable.

Give it a try, you may be pleasantly surprised by what you discover.

I would go with 555 or 560 drivers for the Explicit Sync
support though - I found that it made my xwayland experience
(on Plasma...) significantly better.

Cheers,

Matt.

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On 9/23/24 8:52 PM, Mitchell Dorrell wrote:

I run a lean X system for desktop workflows, with USE="-wayland".
Every unconditional dev-libs/wayland dependency I've encountered has
used dlopen. These were proprietary binary applications like Zoom and
Slack. On an X system, they work completely fine without
dev-libs/wayland, though. If I remember correctly, the word was,
"Upstream says it's a dependency, so it's a dependency.".

The moral of that story is, an unconditional dependency on Wayland
*does not mean* that it isn't fully functional without
dev-libs/wayland.

I took a look at Gentoo's net-im/zoom package as an example.

It has USE=wayland. If you disable wayland support, it deletes:

- /opt/zoom/cef/libGLESv2.so

conditional on the bundled Qt:

- /opt/zoom/Qt/lib/libQt5Wayland*.so*
- /opt/zoom/Qt/plugins/wayland*
- /opt/zoom/Qt/plugins/platforms/libqwayland*.so
- /opt/zoom/Qt/qml/QtWayland


including comments such as "Soname dependency on libwayland-client.so.0"
(for libGLESv2, which doesn't actually seem to be accurate?)


I did say "usually" for a reason. Proprietary software has a dual habit of:
- statically linking to support libraries such as say, libwayland-client
- going to extremes to defer loading libraries which they don't bundle,
behind dlopen conditionals to make it more likely it will run on
diverse end user systems


This is typically just not the case for open source software, because
they can rely on package manager distribution with enforced
dependencies, and people rebuilding from source if they don't want a
specific dependency.

And of course: compiling against libwayland-client and hiding it behind
a dlopen still requires you to have what to compile against as a build dependency, making it less attractive to people that know the software
can simply be recompiled from source.

slack does indeed have only one dependency on dev-libs/wayland that I
can find -- it comes from https://swiftshader.googlesource.com/SwiftShader/+/a88d056919f1a84777c8b33531f40acc74a19d1e%5E%21/

Previously, slack was modified to have an unconditional RDEPEND on
wayland via https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=0328dbab456f04c57b286cf93235f7323c7c5a0f

The commit message indicates exactly why it was added and it was not
"upstream says it's a dependency, so it's a dependency". :) Please open
a bug report for it. Thanks.

...

Overall I think that these phantom wayland dependencies are an artifact
of Electron's constant churn and the fact that every application using
electron basically bundles its own inconsistent copy of it.


--
Eli Schwartz


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On 23/09/2024 23:53, karl@aspodata.se wrote:

It's just the pc hoard that thinks a server is some machine handling databases, mail, files, printers or what

In other words, X uses the words the other way round than most people -
what I said.

Doesn't mean the majority are right! As far as I'm aware X got there
first, but is now swimming against the tide.

Cheers,
Wol

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On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 9:13 PM Matt Jolly <kangie@gentoo.org> wrote:

On 24/9/24 10:52, Mitchell Dorrell wrote:

I run a four-monitor system using NVIDIA's closed-source drivers. Last
I heard, Wayland did not work with such a combination. Has that
changed?

I run several 3-monitor NVIDIA setups on Wayland with no issue.

...

Give it a try, you may be pleasantly surprised by what you discover.

Do you specifically use the closed-source drivers, though?

On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 9:52 PM Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@gentoo.org> wrote:

I did say "usually" for a reason.

Yes, of course. I was only trying to say that using dlopen for a
wayland dependency isn't necessarily rare, and that some ebuilds code
this as an unconditional dependency.

slack does indeed have only one dependency on dev-libs/wayland that I
can find -- it comes from https://swiftshader.googlesource.com/SwiftShader/+/a88d056919f1a84777c8b33531f40acc74a19d1e%5E%21/

Previously, slack was modified to have an unconditional RDEPEND on
wayland via https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=0328dbab456f04c57b286cf93235f7323c7c5a0f

The commit message indicates exactly why it was added and it was not "upstream says it's a dependency, so it's a dependency". :) Please open
a bug report for it. Thanks.

Yep, I'll submit a bug report for Slack when I get a chance. Think I
should also submit one for Zoom, since libGLESv2 doesn't link to it
anymore?

Overall I think that these phantom wayland dependencies are an artifact
of Electron's constant churn and the fact that every application using electron basically bundles its own inconsistent copy of it.

I agree. There's only one other non-CEF/non-Electron application where
I also noticed an unnecessary Wayland dependency. I should submit a
bug report for that, too.

--
Eli Schwartz

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Wol:

On 23/09/2024 23:53, karl@aspodata.se wrote:

It's just the pc hoard that thinks a server is some machine handling

(that should be horde, not hoard even though it sounds funny...)

databases, mail, files, printers or what

In other words, X uses the words the other way round than most people -
what I said.

Doesn't mean the majority are right! As far as I'm aware X got there
first, but is now swimming against the tide.

It could be a case of one million flies cannot be wrong, shit is good..
but at the same time what people call a server is a machine running
server programs, but the server itself is the program running.
Without that program it is just a fancy box, I could use the very same
box and use it as a desktop, and there is another false dicotomy, that
there are desktops and servers, but the majority of all computers out
ther are embedded. And many persons called (prior to laptops) the
box a disk.

So should computer words be defined by non-professionals or thoose
who knows ?

One effect of letting non-professionals define words is the case when
the poeple handling the collection of television licences had the
opinion the a computer is a television set and hence people with a
computer should pay for the right to view television.

So please stop spread misconcetions, or you might say, turn back the tide.

Regards,
/Karl Hammar

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On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 05:11:14PM -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote

Do you have that little faith in the Gentoo Developers, that you
think we'd make a USE flag change that made everyone's systems
suddenly break?

:(

I was around way back when "ipv6" became the default. I was using
Firefox back then. Type in a URL; Firefox spins its wheels for 60
seconds in IPV6; it finally gives up and drops down to IPV4. This
happened with every URL.

After that I ran with USE="-* yada yada yada" for quite some time.
Currently, I'm less extreme, merely disabling a bunch of USE flags...

USE="X apng ffmpeg introspection jpeg opengl openmp png truetype x264 x265 xorg threads vala -acl -caps -clang -context -elogind -filecaps -graphite -gstreamer -haptic -iptables -ipv6 -libav -llvm -manpager -pam -sendmail -spirv -tofu -su -udisks -upower
-wayland"

The "szip" and "xinerama" USE flags seem to have disappeared.

And who can forget the move from /dev/hda hdb hdc etc., to /dev/sda
sdb sdc etc.? Machine literally unbootable on the newly compiled
kernel. Fortunately, I always have "Production" and "Experimental"
kernels. The newly compiled kernel is always "Experimental". If things
go badly, I drop back to the "Production" kernel and try to figure out
what went wrong. Only after a long while do I execute my "promote"
script that copies "Experimental" over top of "Production".

--
There are 2 types of people
1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

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On 24/09/2024 19:32, karl@aspodata.se wrote:

So should computer words be defined by non-professionals or thoose
who knows ?

Well, before computers, I thought servers worked in restaurants ...

(And what the hell are thoose :-)

One effect of letting non-professionals define words is the case when
the poeple handling the collection of television licences had the
opinion the a computer is a television set and hence people with a
computer should pay for the right to view television.

Well, given the number of times I've had to explain to professionals how
they should be doing their *own* job, I really don't think they are the
right people to be let loose on a dictionary ... your typical
professional is paid to do, not to think, and boy do they make a point
of NOT thinking ... (unless they're absolutely forced to, of course.)

(Oh - and if you're talking about the UK licence fee, I've had my
arguments with them about their ability to understand plain English -
like the EXPLICIT wording on the licence "if you are living away from
home eg as a student, you are covered by your home licence if your tv is
not plugged in to the mains". So they demanded my student daughter have
her own licence for her battery-powered tv!)

At the end of the day, jargon is jargon. What matters is that we have a STANDARD. And whether you like it or not, the STANDARD says that X is
using the words the wrong way round. Never mind that X pre-dates the
standard.

It's when people who should know better redefine words that things get
hairy - like the computing professor who used "real time" when he meant "online" or "interactive". And got rather upset when I pointed out that "interactive" and "real time" were different and confusing the two could
cause real harm.

Or those plain idiots who insist on using the word "memory" and refuse
to learn the difference between RAM and disk.

At the end of the day, the meaning of any individual work is irrelevant.
What matters is that we have a shared understanding, a STANDARD.

The only thing that bothers me is those idiots who expect me to be a
mind reader, and who expect me to realise when they use the word A, they actually want me to understand the word B. I don't care whether the word "server" means a restaurant waiter, some computer in a computer room
somewhere, Xorg, or what. Just so long as I have a shared understanding
with the person I'm talking to, and they don't expect me to mind-read
because they can't be bothered to use the right word in the right context.

Cheers,
Wol

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On 24/9/24 19:46, Mitchell Dorrell wrote:

Do you specifically use the closed-source drivers, though?

Yes. In both the 'kernel-open' and regular flavours.

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On 9/24/24 6:00 PM, Walter Dnes wrote:

On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 05:11:14PM -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote

Do you have that little faith in the Gentoo Developers, that you
think we'd make a USE flag change that made everyone's systems
suddenly break?

:(

I was around way back when "ipv6" became the default. I was using
Firefox back then. Type in a URL; Firefox spins its wheels for 60
seconds in IPV6; it finally gives up and drops down to IPV4. This
happened with every URL.

Please do not disable the USE=ipv6, as that is *utterly* insane. It also
does approximately nothing. In packages which support this USE flag,
which is rare, it causes the code to use old, untested APIs which only
support ipv4, rather than new, tested APIs that support ipv4 and ipv6
equally well while having the benefit of being stable, reliable and
efficient.

These old deprecated codepaths are prone to crashing and segfaulting
because the codebase for it is not enabled by anyone and the original implementations are only kept around for the benefit of e.g. ancient
static binaries that cannot be rebuilt.

USE=ipv6 does not mean "ewww, evil bloated ipv6 socket functions".

It has NO influence on whether you use ipv4 or ipv6 traffic, as the vast majority of the software you use doesn't even support the option, they
simply use maintained functions that just ask the kernel to give you
some internet traffic.

If you actually want to disable ipv6, instead of insanely rebuilding
binaries to use untested broken segfaulting code, use the sysctl knob to
tell the kernel "when asked to give some application a bit of internet
traffic, don't use ipv6".

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6

This will:

- actually work

- work with applications that unconditionally use non-deprecated generic
socket APIs

- not crash when running untested code, because the code is actually
tested


Believe you me -- I am **very** aware of the painfulness inherent in applications trying ipv6, failing, not knowing they cannot use ipv6, and eventually timing out.

I historically solved it with the sysctl because my ISP had
broken/nonexistent ipv6, I continue to solve it with the sysctl when my
network cannot handle ipv6, and I will solve it with the sysctl in the
future when my network cannot handle ipv6.

I do not "solve" ipv6 by building 0.05% of my applications with
crash-prone APIs just because those APIs are also so old they predate ipv6.

The new APIs support ipv4 quite well; use them.

I'm sorry to hear you "broke" your own system through your own stubborn ignorance. At no point did Gentoo developers ever break your ipv4, you
are imagining it.

After that I ran with USE="-* yada yada yada" for quite some time. Currently, I'm less extreme, merely disabling a bunch of USE flags...

USE="X apng ffmpeg introspection jpeg opengl openmp png truetype x264 x265 xorg threads vala -acl -caps -clang -context -elogind -filecaps -graphite -gstreamer -haptic -iptables -ipv6 -libav -llvm -manpager -pam -sendmail -spirv -tofu -su -udisks -

upower -wayland"

The "szip" and "xinerama" USE flags seem to have disappeared.

That's quite the bloated collection of enabled USE flags you have there
-- lots of stuff that are much more bloated than ipv6, in fact. :)

And really, you despise app-text/manpager with such ferocity that you
have to set a global USE for it lest a second program come to add that USE?

You hate /usr/bin/su so much that it's simply intolerable that
util-linux might build it?

But support for animated PNG files is too precious and dear to you, that feature you absolutely have to have. Oh no, the bloat! We will be buried
under it!

...

But using a tested ipv4 codepath instead of an untested ipv4 codepath is
too much bloat for you, so you'd rather the crashes and the segfaults. Brilliant.

And who can forget the move from /dev/hda hdb hdc etc., to /dev/sda
sdb sdc etc.? Machine literally unbootable on the newly compiled
kernel. Fortunately, I always have "Production" and "Experimental"
kernels. The newly compiled kernel is always "Experimental". If things
go badly, I drop back to the "Production" kernel and try to figure out
what went wrong. Only after a long while do I execute my "promote"
script that copies "Experimental" over top of "Production".

That's quite the long-term grudge you have there. "Who can forget" it
indeed. ;) How about: pretty much everyone. What a tempest in a teapot.

(Even if I took this rant seriously, that wasn't anything the Gentoo
developers did. What's your proposed remediation, stay on the earlier
editions of kernel 2.6 for another 15 years because "that newfangled 2.6
kernel man, that's just totally breaking my system"?)

Your kernel testing and rotation management is boringly plebeian, as
it's what approximately every other Gentoo system does by default
without any configuration needed.


--
Eli Schwartz


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On Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 09:42:23PM -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote

If you actually want to disable ipv6, instead of insanely rebuilding
binaries to use untested broken segfaulting code, use the sysctl
knob to tell the kernel "when asked to give some application a bit
of internet traffic, don't use ipv6".

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6

My system is actually very stable. In the shitstorm that erupted on
this list at "ipv6" enabling I did not see any mention of sysctl. In my /etc/default/grub file I have...

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="noexec=on net.ifnames=0 ipv6.disable=1"

With this setting is it guaranteed that a program compiled with "ipv6"
flag will not try IPV6 first and timeout before dropping down to IPV4?

How OS-specific is this? I "asked Mr. Google" and the NordVPN web
page recommended for Redhat based distros...

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.tun0.disable_ipv6=1

For Debian-based distros...

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.tun0.disable_ipv6 = 1

Other answers for disabling IPV6 include stuff like...

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.eth0.disable_ipv6 = 1

BTW, I did *NOT* have IPV6 enabled when the USE flag changed...

[x8940][root][~] grep IPV6 /usr/src/linux/.config
# CONFIG_IPV6 is not set

That's quite the bloated collection of enabled USE flags you have
there -- lots of stuff that are much more bloated than ipv6, in
fact. :)

Stuff that I don't use is left disabled. I occasionally look at my package.use file. If a flag is enabled for multiple apps there, I run

USE="flag" emerge -pv --changed-use --deep --pdate @world

If there isn't much new stuff pulled in I'll...

* enable the flag in make.conf
* delete the enabling entries in package.use
* disable, in package.use, the flag for new stuff that tha flag pulls in

This minimizes the size of my package.use file. Note: this is optimal
for the collection of apps *THAT I USE*. YMMV.

--
There are 2 types of people
1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

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Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> writes:

On Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 09:42:23PM -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote

If you actually want to disable ipv6, instead of insanely rebuilding
binaries to use untested broken segfaulting code, use the sysctl
knob to tell the kernel "when asked to give some application a bit
of internet traffic, don't use ipv6".

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6

My system is actually very stable. In the shitstorm that erupted on
this list at "ipv6" enabling I did not see any mention of sysctl. In my /etc/default/grub file I have...

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="noexec=on net.ifnames=0 ipv6.disable=1"

With this setting is it guaranteed that a program compiled with "ipv6"
flag will not try IPV6 first and timeout before dropping down to IPV4?

That's not how IPv6 is supported. Dual-stack support relies on 'happy eyeballs', an algorithm by which both IPv4 and v6 are tried
optimistically, and the first one to succeed is accepted. This adds no latency. I suspect your Firefox anecdote happened due to
misconfiguration (I think network.http.fast-fallback-to-IPv4 dictates
the use of this algorithm in Firefox).

As a point of reference, I do nothing to disable IPv6 support, and my
ISP does not provide IPv6 support, yet I have no added latency due to
IPv6 support being enabled. I just get the benefits of better LANs and internal networks.

There is no reason to disable IPv6 support, as Eli said (especially if
yo do not know _what_ you're trying to disable, and are just trying to blanket-disable a vague concept of IPv6).

How OS-specific is this?

Not at all.

I "asked Mr. Google" and the NordVPN web page recommended for Redhat
based distros...

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1
net.ipv6.conf.tun0.disable_ipv6=1

For Debian-based distros...

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.tun0.disable_ipv6 = 1

Other answers for disabling IPV6 include stuff like...

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.eth0.disable_ipv6 = 1

Note that all of the above include interface names, this is why they
differ, and just copy-pasting them blindly will not work.

Note also that they're all identical, save for the interfaces mentioned.

BTW, I did *NOT* have IPV6 enabled when the USE flag changed...

[x8940][root][~] grep IPV6 /usr/src/linux/.config
# CONFIG_IPV6 is not set

That's quite the bloated collection of enabled USE flags you have
there -- lots of stuff that are much more bloated than ipv6, in
fact. :)

Stuff that I don't use is left disabled. I occasionally look at my package.use file. If a flag is enabled for multiple apps there, I run

USE="flag" emerge -pv --changed-use --deep --pdate @world

If there isn't much new stuff pulled in I'll...

* enable the flag in make.conf
* delete the enabling entries in package.use
* disable, in package.use, the flag for new stuff that tha flag pulls in

This minimizes the size of my package.use file. Note: this is optimal
for the collection of apps *THAT I USE*. YMMV.

--
Arsen Arsenović

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On 9/25/24 6:00 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:

My system is actually very stable. In the shitstorm that erupted on
this list at "ipv6" enabling I did not see any mention of sysctl. In my /etc/default/grub file I have...

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="noexec=on net.ifnames=0 ipv6.disable=1"

With this setting is it guaranteed that a program compiled with "ipv6"
flag will not try IPV6 first and timeout before dropping down to IPV4?

(Note that the sysctl dynamically disables ipv6 support so that you can manually toggle it after boot, e.g. for testing. The kernel command line
option hard-disables it at boot time. Your choice which to use, I guess.)


If the kernel has disabled ipv6 there is no timeout because no attempt
is made.

If the kernel has enabled ipv6 then an attempt will be made and it may:

- succeed, if your network has functioning ipv6 connectivity

- fail instantly, if your network is correctly configured (you may not
be in control of the network you use)

- fail after a lengthy timeout after your network "valiantly" attempts
to send your connection attempt into a black hole of doom

As Arsen mentioned, RFC 8305 defines the "Happy Eyeballs" mechanism for
trying both ipv4 and ipv6 at the same time, incurring the cost of
slightly more traffic for the benefit of avoiding timeouts (since ipv4
will still succeed just as fast regardless of whether a parallel ipv6 is
timing out, and as soon as ipv4 succeeds, the ipv6 timeout is ignored
and made redundant).

Not all software uses Happy Eyeballs. In particular, emerge --sync does
not, because the python library that portage uses to check for updated
PGP keys used when validating manifests, does not. This pained me
tremendously since "emerge --sync" would literally hang forever, until I disabled ipv6 via the kernel. Note that since Aug 31, 2021, Gentoo's
package for python has not supported USE=ipv6, but the sysctl works
quite well.

How OS-specific is this? I "asked Mr. Google" and the NordVPN web
page recommended for Redhat based distros...

It is specific to the linux kernel, that is all. You may replace "all"
with the name of a machine-specific interface (as listed by "ip addr")
to express settings that are specific to a given interface. Most people
do not need that flexibility and simply want all interfaces to look the
same.


--
Eli Schwartz


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On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 01:53:49PM +0200, Arsen Arsenović wrote

I suspect your Firefox anecdote happened due to misconfiguration
(I think network.http.fast-fallback-to-IPv4 dictates the use of this algorithm in Firefox).

I do not recall ever touching it in about:config. In my current
browser (Pale Moon) that setting is at its default value of "true".

As a point of reference, I do nothing to disable IPv6 support, and my
ISP does not provide IPv6 support, yet I have no added latency due to
IPv6 support being enabled. I just get the benefits of better LANs and internal networks.

There is no reason to disable IPv6 support, as Eli said (especially if
yo do not know _what_ you're trying to disable, and are just trying to blanket-disable a vague concept of IPv6).

This is *NOT* about a "vague concept". This is about solving a bug
that makes browsing unbearable. I'm not the only one. See archive https://public-inbox.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/14d2d8af-e7b9-d5e6-06c1-a7f3ad01ac23@gmail.com/

When syncing portage today I saw what the delay is: apparently it
tries ipv6 twice, fails, then resorts to ipv4 which works fine.

Most of my systems now have ipv6 support removed, and viola! no
more delays.

In his case, the delay was only 10 seconds, but a delay nonetheless.
This raises another point, it was not just Firefox that ran into
problems, but rather anything that talked to the internet.

Back in January, my ISP migrated me from cable to fibre. I went from
legacy 10 mbits down 1 up, 200 gigabytes/month quota, to "30 mbits
symmetric unlimited" for the same price. The fibre service does have
IPV6 enabled, and I'll get around to going IPV6 one of these days,
especially if there's a "flag day" shutdown of IPV4.

--
There are 2 types of people
1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

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On 9/25/24 6:21 PM, Walter Dnes wrote:

There is no reason to disable IPv6 support, as Eli said (especially if
yo do not know _what_ you're trying to disable, and are just trying to
blanket-disable a vague concept of IPv6).

This is *NOT* about a "vague concept". This is about solving a bug
that makes browsing unbearable.

I think the two of you are talking past each other. What did Arsen mean
by "the vague concept of IPv6"? I suspect he meant:

You are trying to solve a concrete user issue with your browsing.

Your idea of how to solve the user issue is to blame IPv6, then get all
meta about how to solve it and decide that the vague concept of IPv6
must be eradicated and purged from the public consciousness -- rather
than disabling the specific issue that is causing problems.

I'm not the only one. See archive https://public-inbox.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/14d2d8af-e7b9-d5e6-06c1-a7f3ad01ac23@gmail.com/

When syncing portage today I saw what the delay is: apparently it
tries ipv6 twice, fails, then resorts to ipv4 which works fine.

Most of my systems now have ipv6 support removed, and viola! no
more delays.

In his case, the delay was only 10 seconds, but a delay nonetheless.
This raises another point, it was not just Firefox that ran into
problems, but rather anything that talked to the internet.

Hmm, that's basically what I said up-thread too. :) Portage, like many
other packages, talks to the internet and can have timeouts when IPv6 is broken.

And there is no USE=ipv6 to disable for portage, nor for
dev-lang/python, nor for dev-python/requests. So how do you fix the problem?

Via the kernel command line or the sysctl. Easy.

In the thread you link to, people spent days blaming systemd for
"blocking ipv6 removal in our kernel .config" and had to switch init
systems just so they could reconfigure and rebuild their kernel.

Eventually someone suggested setting ipv6.disable_ipv6=1 on the kernel
command line. But the person with the original issue had already, by
that time,

"""
managed to switch back to openrc. That didn't go real smoothly, portage couldn't figure out how to do it on it's own after switching profiles,
it was blindly removing and rebuilding some packages manually that
eventually made it work and not want to pull in systemd again
"""

and never actually bothered setting the kernel command line, nor
listening to the advice of the people in the thread who suggested that
the kernel .config option for systemd is not actually required to run
systemd, it's just a quick toggle for people who want to bulk-enable
settings that are best to use when running systemd.

And this is why rumors of how you need to set USE="-ipv6" to "make your
system stop timing out" spread. Because no one actually pays attention
to reality, and no one actually bothers to test the kernel command line
or sysctl options, so they spend days recompiling their system and
juggling USE flags and swapping back and forth between init systems in
the hope that it will stop the timeouts.

And all along it was literally a couple lines in a text file and one
`sysctl` command away, without even needing to reboot.

All it takes is people not running around like headless chickens.

All it takes is people not claiming that the Gentoo Developers have
"infamously made a USE flag change that made everyone's systems suddenly break".



--
Eli Schwartz


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On 2024-09-24 21:42:23, Eli Schwartz wrote:

Please do not disable the USE=ipv6, as that is *utterly* insane. It also
does approximately nothing. In packages which support this USE flag,
which is rare, it causes the code to use old, untested APIs which only support ipv4, rather than new, tested APIs that support ipv4 and ipv6
equally well while having the benefit of being stable, reliable and efficient.

I think this greatly depends on the package. djbdns is fresh on my
mind, and djbdns[ipv6] will pull in a massive third-party patch to add
support for serving ipv6 records. The changes are so pervasive that
(a) they required manually re-rolling several ipv4 security patches,
and (b) may reintroduce some of the same security issues over ipv6, if
nobody is filing CVEs against the patch. It's not clear-cut, but you
can certainly argue that you're better off without USE=ipv6 if you're
not serving ipv6 records.

Pkgcheck has been warning about "bad" instances of USE=ipv6 for some
time now. The longer the warning stays in place, the more packages we
can expect to import some special useful meaning to it.

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On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 08:25:12PM -0400, Eli Schwartz wrote

I think the two of you are talking past each other. What did Arsen mean
by "the vague concept of IPv6"? I suspect he meant:

You are trying to solve a concrete user issue with your browsing.

Correct.

Your idea of how to solve the user issue is to blame IPv6, then get all
meta about how to solve it and decide that the vague concept of IPv6
must be eradicated and purged from the public consciousness

You're overdoing it and you seem offended. I was not "thinking deep
thoughts about IPV6" or going off the deep end with QANON conspiracies.
Back then I was unaware of the power of sysctl or using the kernel
command line. All that I (and a lot of other people) knew was that...

USE="ipv6" ==> delays and timeouts for people on IPV4-only systems

USE="-ipv6" ==> problems solved for people on IPV4-only systems

This was simply a pragmatic decision to solve a problem. Firefox
with USE="ipv6" probably would've worked OK on a machine with a working
IPV6 connection.

-- rather than disabling the specific issue that is causing problems.

Looking at the output of "sysctl -a | grep net.ip | less" *ON MY
SYSTEM*, I see a slew of "net.ipv4.*" entries, but no "net.ipv6.*"
entries, so there's no "sysctl knob" to tweak.

--
There are 2 types of people
1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

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"WD" == Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> writes:

This is *NOT* about a "vague concept". This is about solving a bug
that makes browsing unbearable. I'm not the only one. See archive https://public-inbox.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/14d2d8af-e7b9-d5e6-06c1-a7f3ad01ac23@gmail.com/

if you want your box always to prefer ipv4 over ipv6, edit /etc/gai.conf
and add this line:

precedence ::ffff:0:0/96 100

then the network stack will try ip6 addresses only for names which have
AAAA records but do not have A records in dns.

-JimC
--
James Cloos <cloos@jhcloos.com>
OpenPGP: https://jhcloos.com/0x997A9F17ED7DAEA6.asc

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