docs: Add new "Tips and Tricks" section

Funky185540 commented 2 years ago

Adds a new section containing general tips and tricks for working with rpm-ostree based operating systems.

@travier Tagging you here due to the sync to the Kinoite docs, in case this gets approval. :)

Funky185540 commented 2 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

The changes are in now, hope I spotted everything.

tpopela commented 2 years ago

I think that https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/silverblue-docs/pull/119#discussion_r786687346 is still valid - replace flatpak with Flatpak applications

Funky185540 commented 2 years ago

Sorry, missed those! Should be in now. Besides that, I added a new subsection to working with toolbx in a second commit.

Funky185540 commented 2 years ago

Oh, I had missed the end quote and miss-read the whole thing. Let's make it one line with echo -e '...\n...' and write to /usr/local/bin instead? To make it clear that this has to be run inside a toolbox, you may use [toolbox]$ for the prompt maybe?

@travier Thanks for the input. I now turned it into a (lengthy) oneliner and pipe the output of tee to /dev/null so it doesn't show up on the CLI, because it's rather confusing. I also added the [toolbx] in front of the prompt hoping it reduces confusion and helps someone...

However I kept the path at /usr/bin/flatpak, because I think that this is rather nice for the following reason:

If the user does run it from the host, maybe this reassures them that they cannot (by accident) delete their systems executables under /usr/bin, which is a cool thing to have tested once. :)
If I changed the path to /usr/local/bin, then executing the command on the host would actually create the flatpak command there, and given that this comes before /usr/bin in $PATH, the user would always run flatpak as flatpak-spawn --host flatpak ... without ever noticing. This feels wrong and I'd like to avoid people running into weird issues with this...
Also this would allow anyone interested to hardcode flatpak e.g. in custom scripts as /usr/bin/flatpak, which hopefully should aid in not breaking workflows for people depending on whether they are running on the host or in toolbx...

Not sure if the last one's really relevant, but I could very well imagine so. :)

travier commented 2 years ago

If we are concerned that people might run this in the wrong environment, then I think we should have the script check for that in order to make it do the right thing in all cases.

I'm not sure writing to /usr/bin/flatpak is a good idea as it might create unexpected interactions if users install flatpak inside their toolbx (will they get a clean error from dnf? I have not tried that yet). They might not install it directly but it could get pulled as a dependency.

Thus I think we should keep it at /usr/local/ and we should probably reverse the order of the first two sections to make it logical:

Here is how to check if you are running in a toolbox.
Here is how to make calling a program work whatever the environment you are in.

As this will probably be a much longer line now, maybe we should show it like this instead:

Ensure you are running in a toolbx:
$ cat ...

Write the following content to `.....`:
$ cat .....
.....

Don't forget to make it executable:
$ chmod ...

Funky185540 commented 2 years ago

I kept the general structure but reordered the Toolbx subsections as suggested. The CLI for creating the alias is still very long, is that ok?

travier commented 2 years ago

Ping @tpopela or I'll merge this on Monday 🙂.

Funky185540 commented 2 years ago

Thank you! :)

fedora-silverblue / silverblue-docs

docs: Add new "Tips and Tricks" section #119