The future of Quirky

My previous blog at barryk.org/news was merged into this blog. It lumped all posts for Easy, Quirky, Puppy, and anything else Linux-related, into one category "linux".

I have identified many of the posts that are about Quirky, and added the tag "quirky", so that they can now be separated out:

http://bkhome.org/news/tag_quirky.html

I don't have an automated method to do this, so did in manually, and haven't got them all.

I have announced Easy OS as the "next generation", however, Quirky is still good, and I reckon should continue. The thing is, they are different, with different strengths and weaknesses.

Quirky started out as an experimental distribution sometime in 2013, and settled into a full-installation-only distro, but different from other Linuxes due to its snapshot/rollback/recovery mechanism. There is also a special rollback mechanism for installing and removing packages. Then later, a live-CD and frugal install was added on, though I have never thought of that as the way I want Quirky to go.

Then early 2017 I conceived Easy, a complete rethink, going back to a layered filesystem, with just one "pupmode", and support for containers.

Regarding Quirky, one problem is the slowness of the snapshot/rollback/recovery. It uses the cmptree utility. However, I could use diff to do the same thing. I ran a test, compared roofs-complete/usr with /usr, where the former is a build of Quirky in woofQ and the latter is in a running Quirky 8.3.

cmptree /usr ./usr took 195 seconds,
diff -rq /usr ./usr took 44 seconds

EDIT
Ha ha, my memory gets a bit fuzzy when haven't worked on something for awhile. I have already removed cmptree. Did it back in Nov-Dec 2016, replaced with xdelta3.

Tags: quirky