miniblog.

Remarkable, sobering discussion of how hard it is to write bytes to a file robustly: https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/ APIs are subtle, filesystems have different safety modes, they sometimes discard errors, not everyone complies with POSIX, and sometimes hardware doesn't meet its spec!

I've realised that few of the bugs I fix are actually failures to meet a spec. They're mostly 'it would be nicer/more consistent if...'

I'm a happy Arch Linux user, but I often meet people who think Arch is a compile-from-scratch distro. Where does this idea come from?