Re: [gentoo-user] Wayland! Beware of!

[Eli Schwartz <eschwartz@gentoo.org>]

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On 9/25/24 6:21 PM, Walter Dnes wrote:
>> There is no reason to disable IPv6 support, as Eli said (especially if
>> yo do not know _what_ you're trying to disable, and are just trying to
>> blanket-disable a vague concept of IPv6).
> 
>   This is *NOT* about a "vague concept".  This is about solving a bug
> that makes browsing unbearable.


I think the two of you are talking past each other. What did Arsen mean
by "the vague concept of IPv6"? I suspect he meant:

You are trying to solve a concrete user issue with your browsing.

Your idea of how to solve the user issue is to blame IPv6, then get all
meta about how to solve it and decide that the vague concept of IPv6
must be eradicated and purged from the public consciousness -- rather
than disabling the specific issue that is causing problems.


> I'm not the only one.  See archive
> https://public-inbox.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/14d2d8af-e7b9-d5e6-06c1-a7f3ad01ac23@gmail.com/
> 
>> When syncing portage today I saw what the delay is: apparently it
>> tries ipv6 twice, fails, then resorts to ipv4 which works fine.
>>
>> Most of my systems now have ipv6 support removed, and viola! no
>> more delays.
> 
>   In his case, the delay was only 10 seconds, but a delay nonetheless.
> This raises another point, it was not just Firefox that ran into
> problems, but rather anything that talked to the internet.


Hmm, that's basically what I said up-thread too. :) Portage, like many
other packages, talks to the internet and can have timeouts when IPv6 is
broken.

And there is no USE=ipv6 to disable for portage, nor for
dev-lang/python, nor for dev-python/requests. So how do you fix the problem?

Via the kernel command line or the sysctl. Easy.

In the thread you link to, people spent days blaming systemd for
"blocking ipv6 removal in our kernel .config" and had to switch init
systems just so they could reconfigure and rebuild their kernel.

Eventually someone suggested setting ipv6.disable_ipv6=1 on the kernel
command line. But the person with the original issue had already, by
that time,

"""
managed to switch back to openrc. That didn't go real smoothly, portage
couldn't figure out how to do it on it's own after switching profiles,
it was blindly removing and rebuilding some packages manually that
eventually made it work and not want to pull in systemd again
"""

and never actually bothered setting the kernel command line, nor
listening to the advice of the people in the thread who suggested that
the kernel .config option for systemd is not actually required to run
systemd, it's just a quick toggle for people who want to bulk-enable
settings that are best to use when running systemd.

And this is why rumors of how you need to set USE="-ipv6" to "make your
system stop timing out" spread. Because no one actually pays attention
to reality, and no one actually bothers to test the kernel command line
or sysctl options, so they spend days recompiling their system and
juggling USE flags and swapping back and forth between init systems in
the hope that it will stop the timeouts.

And all along it was literally a couple lines in a text file and one
`sysctl` command away, without even needing to reboot.

All it takes is people not running around like headless chickens.

All it takes is people not claiming that the Gentoo Developers have
"infamously made a USE flag change that made everyone's systems suddenly
break".



-- 
Eli Schwartz


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