I do miss the old typewriter. Not so much the selectric era, but more the well-balanced instrumentation of a manual.

Still, there is a lot to be said for the amber glow of full-screened vim session on such a portable device.

The one thing I truly wish for, is a solar-powered writerdeck, i.e. 100% off grid, forever. Just like the good ol’ typewriter ..

There were halon systems protecting the computer rooms we operated, and one day I set them off in a most spectacular way by .. forgetting to add a line feed byte alongside the carriage return bytes on one particularly large log .. so one night the paper-feed line printer from IBM that sat in the corner, serving as a hard copy for required logs to be saved, proceed to print every single character in a multi-megabyte log, as quickly as possible, to the same paper position .. over and over again .. catching fire after some minutes and leaving me in the operator chair with a mask on, having to explain to my very irate boss the difference between a print job with cr/lf and one with only cr’s ..

Two days later, another more senior operator did the same thing, so it stung a little less after that, but man .. it was not fun knowing that I could burn the place down with a random typo or two (I’d not put ‘tr’ in the right place for the report, d’oh!)

:)

Either way, Germany has perfected the efficient foot bullet, at least.

I could imagine Kraftwerk devising a stonkin’ “Fußkugel” track, actually ..

Literally none of your statements are applicable to that realm, sorry.

Rail operators have long since been operating their air-gapped infrastructure with 99.999% safety results, literally not adhering to any of the policies you claim are endemic to the industry.

Toolchains absolutely need to be maintained with some degree of longevity.

The whole world doesn’t march to your consumer-user beat. Sometimes it functions at industrial-user tempo’s, too ..

Think industrial applications, such as rail and heavy industry transportation. We use reproducible builds here as part of a wider safety-critical protocol which guarantees that what we are running is what we expect to run - nothing more, nothing less.

Reproducible builds are certifiable. They can be relied on in environments where certification costs millions and takes years.

Think outside your consumer box for a minute.

There are plenty of places in industrial computing where reproducible builds have prevented subterfuge within the organizations themselves. Injecting binaries to do inf-/exfiltration is a long-standing industrial espionage activity which is of immense value to all users of the operating system - not just the consumer users.

Reproducible builds are an essential method in industrial computing - Debian isn’t at the forefront of this, it is merely adopting industry wide techniques also applied to other operating systems in use in long-term and safety-related applications.

Certainly, a lot of the hard work of the Yocto and Debian developers is already in your hands.

What is interesting is that this is now being applied in a more forward-focused policy by the Debian developers, that it will now be the norm rather than an option…