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Custom Binaries to Ease Onboarding Using Go
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
It recently came up that I needed to release a helper tool for our work environment. I was limited with regards to my distribution methods since much of the user base is BYOD based. Having Go in my toolbox, I knew that I could use Go to ease the distribution. One of Go’s selling points is its ability to package up all of its dependencies and runtime at compile time, so that you can avoid the runtime dependencies management issues that often arise.
In this case, the executable I built required a lot of configuration information—our list of compute clusters, the authentication endpoint, and an authentication client ID (OAuth 2 based)—so I wrote up and released the documentation on how a user can configure the tool for our environment.
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