^This comment is talking about the deluge of log messages you may or may not see (depending on the distro) while booting the system.

Just thought I’d add that, since the meme doesn’t actually mention booting. Not sure, where you got that from. 😅

minimum

It tickles me that, because I was expecting a different word, I read this as “mini-mum”. 🙃

Yeah, but he has stated that he really doesn’t have an opinion. He just happened to install Fedora on the family PC a long time ago and now he neither wants to deal with two separate distros, nor switch the whole household over.

I was gonna object that it’s a vegan diet, because they’re presumably not gonna do eggs or milk, but apparently not strictly vegetarian either:

Mountain gorillas spend about a quarter of their day eating, mainly plants. Around 85% of their diet is made up of leaves, shoots and stems, but gorillas can also eat larvae, snails, ants, and even roots, barks and rotting wood (a good source of sodium/salt).

https://www.wwf.org.uk/learn/fascinating-facts/gorillas

I mean, yeah, this shouldn’t be seen as an announcement or whatever, but rather as a thing to discuss and potentially get involved in. KDE is a community project after all.

I mean, I do like the idea, but syncing such a database file is by far the smallest challenge about this (and could be easily achieved today with e.g. Syncthing or Rsync).

The far harder part is getting RSS readers to support the same file format. There is actually a small project (by basically a singular guy), which tries to accomplish this: https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync
The desktop RSS reader it supports is GTK, though.

Somewhat of a technologically simpler solution might be to self-host FreshRSS.
Unfortunately, it is of course less simple to actually use, unless you have a home server and some sysadmin skills…

Well, I have it bound to Super+X, but you could do any of those. I just create a .desktop file for it and then it can be used like a normal application. And well, it is intentionally built so you don’t have to pass command-line flags or see the command output for creating the file.

So, this is the program I use: https://codeberg.org/trem/jot
It has basically three larger features, which is adding a file, removing empty files (because you sometimes might end up creating a file, but not using it) and then searching through empty files.
Honestly, none of these are particularly difficult to throw together in a Bash script yourself, if you don’t feel like using a random program off the internet.

Basically, for adding a file, this is a crappy version of it:

data_dir="$HOME/.local/share/notes"
mkdir -p $data_dir
date=$(date +%s)
file_name="$data_dir/${date}.md"
touch $file_name
xdg-open $file_name

And for searching through the created files, grep -iR -C2 $data_dir is virtually just as good, too. 🫠

Well, I assume they had other concerns, too. For example, it adds a bunch of complexity for reformatting a JSON from single-line to pretty-print, if comments can appear in there. I’m certainly not saying that I’m always best friends with the decision to remove comments, just that I can somewhat understand it.

Hmm, if I understand you correctly, this is about Windows blocking access to files while they’re being accessed by other processes. Kate is primarily built for Linux where this would not be a problem to begin with, so it is well-possible that it does not handle this gracefully.

But it does actually keep its own buffer for files. By default, you have to actively click in the UI before it will load the changes from the file. It does watch the file for file changes, but I don’t think, it has to keep the file open for that, since there’s kernel APIs to be notified for file changes on all mainstream operating systems these days.

So, uh, TL;DR: I don’t actually know, but I’m somewhat optimistic. 🫠

I have a tiny program/script that creates a file in a folder underneath ~/.local/share with basically just a timestamp in the file name and then it opens it in Kate. Certainly somewhat of a workaround, but it works quite well for me.

I can understand the sentiment and would 100% agree for programming languages.
But personally I actually like that it encourages a flat structure, because you do not want to be yakshaving the structure of your config file. Too much nesting means you will sooner or later run into configuration keys being nested under the wrong category, because your project context changed over time.

And well, as I’ve argued in a few other comments already, I think non-techie users have a disproportionally simpler time when no nesting is used. They understand the concept of a heading and then just adding a line underneath the appropriate heading is really intuitive.
You can just tell them to add the line certificate="/tmp/cert.crt" under [network.tls] and they will find a line in their config file which actually reads [network.tls] and they can just paste that line as-is.

With nesting, they’d need to add it under here:

network: {
    tls: {
        certificate: "/tmp/cert.crt"
    }
}

Which means:

• You need some awkward explanation where they should nest it, or an explanation that e.g. “network.tls” translates to nesting.
• They will ask whether they should indent the line you sent them.
• Well, and it’s also surprisingly difficult to explain between which braces they should put the text, and that’s at the end of the braces, but not after the braces etc., if you’re talking to them on a call.

It’s not even that I’m completely enamored with TOML, but this aspect is certainly growing on me…

I’m always surprised to hear people believe in ghosts, not because I consider it particularly ridiculous, but rather because ghosts have no relevance in my life. I don’t need them to exist to explain what’s happening around me.

Every few years or so, I might hear a noise where I don’t have an explanation, but that always feels adequately explained by me not knowing things. I’m constantly surrounded by living beings as well as materials that are subject to gravity, temperature, humidity etc.. Occasionally, they’ll make noises quite naturally.

Their point is that one could come up with a billion hypotheticals for what might theoretically exist, because we cannot disprove it. If we spent as much time humming and hawing whether each one actually does exist as we do for ghosts, souls, gods, Big Foot etc., then you won’t be doing anything else in life.
That’s why it’s a typical position to just say that they don’t exist until proven otherwise.

Or in the more general sense, this is Occam’s Razor: If there’s multiple possible explanations for something, then one should assume the simplest explanation until proven otherwise.
And if you hear a door slamming shut in your house, then wind is a much simpler explanation than ghosts.

VSCode is Electron, i.e. a webpage, so it’s not hugely surprising that they opted for the natively supported JavaScript Object Notation. And also shows that they don’t care for using the right tool for the job to begin with.

Personally, I much prefer TOML over YAML, because it does not have significant whitespace, and because you can read the spec in a reasonable amount of time. It just has so much less complexity, while still covering the vast majority of use-cases perfectly well.

They’re not supposed to contain data, but some parsers will allow you to access what’s written into comments. And so, of course, someone made use of that and I had to extract what was encoded basically like that:

<!--
    Host: toaster,
    Location: moon,
-->
<data>Actual XML follows...</data>

My best guess is that they added this data into comments rather than child nodes or attributes, because they were worried some of the programs using this XML would not be able to handle an extension of the format.

We just document that this is how you write the config file:

[network]
bind.host = "127.0.0.1"
bind.port = 1234

# etc.

And that seems straightforward enough. Yeah, technically users can opt to use inline tables or raw strings or whatever, but they don’t have to.

This one should work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Vs.

I can kind of understand it after having to work with an XML file where users encoded data into comments for no good reason. But yeah, it does make JSON awkward for lots of potential use-cases.

I don’t feel like it will stray very far from what’s dubbed “TOML 0.1” in the meme. Yes, it has inline tables and as of TOML 1.1, they’re allowed to span multiple lines, so it’s technically not anymore illegal to do what’s in the meme. But all things considered, this is still a miniscule change compared to TOML 1.0.

Well, you can still decide how much of the TOML features you actually use in your specific application. For example, I’m currently involved in two projects at $DAYJOB where we read TOML configurations and we don’t make use of the inline tables that OP memes about in either of them.

Ultimately, the big advantage of TOML over INI is that it standardizes all kinds of small INI extensions that folks have come up with over the decades. As such, it has a formal specification and in particular only one specification.
You can assume that you can read the same TOML file from two different programming languages, which you cannot just assume for INI.