18/01/2020: This week in KISS (#7)

Lots of interesting changes this week. A big thank you to everyone involved.

If you have any questions about this post, feel free to join the IRC channel #kisslinux @ freenode.net.

Index

Git support in the package manager

The package manager now supports Git repositories as sources in the package system. The syntax is rather simple and the pull request can be seen here: https://github.com/kiss-community/kiss/pull/85/files

Source format:

# git+URL
git+https://github.com/dylanaraps/eiwd

# git+URL#hash
git+https://github.com/dylanaraps/eiwd#4a2d30bd1b053a9f1e4373d17c2ae6f3ccbc4148

Version:

# Simply use git.
git

# Or use a hash if supplied to the source.
4a2d30bd1b053a9f1e4373d17c2ae6f3ccbc4148

GNU Grep support in the package manager

GNU Grep support has been added to the package manager as a simple means of achieving performance gains.

Those who value performance over POSIX correctness now have the choice to install gnugrep to speed up various operations in the package manager.

GNU Grep is super quick compared to other Grep implementations. See this post by the original author of GNU Grep: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-August/019310.html

Firefox ESR

KISS now tracks Firefox ESR and in addition, binaries are now available to users by installing the package firefox-bin.

The swap was made as Firefox builds (and updates) are monthly, unpredictable and time consuming both for users and myself.

Rust is also another reason for the change as Firefox releases track the latest Rust releases and they're a hard two packages to juggle.

Users now have the choice between building Firefox and Rust or installing a binary provided by yours truly.

Falkon (and qtwebengine)

The Falkon web browser and qtwebengine are now available in the repositories as an alternative to Firefox.

I spent the last few days getting grabbing, porting and writing patches to enable all of this to work on Musl.

And yes, KISS uses the latest Qt and Qtwebengine!

I have personally swapped to Falkon and everything works flawlessly. My system is now free of GTK, glib and other GNOME software!

A big thank you to those in the IRC providing advice and a big thank you to meta-qt5 for a bulk of the patches.

webkit2gtk

Webkit2GTK is now available in the repositories thanks to the work of the Carbs Linux developer Cem Keylan and myself.

Carbs Linux is a distribution based on KISS which aims to take a more Suckless approach as an operating system.

This enables further browser choice by allowing the use of browsers like luakit, suckless surf and others.

KISS ported to aarch64

KISS has been ported to aarch64 by jedavies-dev who is also the creator and maintainer of the ppc64le port.

More information: https://github.com/jedavies-dev/kiss-aarch64

Official Repositories

Community

Legal stuff

The registered trademark Linux® is used pursuant to a sublicense from the Linux Foundation, the exclusive licensee of Linus Torvalds, owner of the mark on a world­wide basis.

© Dylan Araps 2019-2020