Re: Upgrading without central packaging

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From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Upgrading without central packaging
Date: 23:03 on 23 Apr 2005
> But none of it can easily be done in bulk, which means that if you want
> to do more than one program, the easy bit is gone.

That's true. If I needed to do it in bulk, because, say, my system was a GNOME
style rats-nest of incompatble dependencies, I'd hate not being able to do it
in bulk. Luckily it's not.

> That helps. But it feels like one of those GUIs for Debian's apt, a big
> difference being that this GUI can only search and install, while apt
> GUIs can also upgrade and remove from a central application.

Lets get together some time for a hate-fest for things that only
come in GUI form, with a side-order of stuff that only comes with
a web-interface that doesn't even work without a modern browser
and lots of CSS and Javascript magic so you can't even script access
to it easily. Oh yes, oh yes.

> I don't understand why when something's easy, people stop trying to make
> it even easier.

Because good enough is good enough, and if it's hard to make things a bit
better that's where things stay. When getting things better involves herding
cats (like, say, getting all developers to agree on how to standardise
automatic update) it's real hard to make things better.

The only way to break out of this is to pay someone (in money or egoboo) to
do it, or for someone who thinks they can get money or egoboo from doing a
better job somewhere else to provide competition.

> > >      9. select two icons (dmg and mounted volume)
> > >     10. drag them to Trash
> > Drag the DMG to "/Local/Installed" so you have a clean copy, and when
> > you clicked eject you unmounted the DMG and closed the window.
> 
> And maintain updates in two places? That's even more work. If I need it
> again, I'll apt-ge^H^H^H^H^H^Hmanually download it again...

You'll learn. After a while you get tired of discovering that the people who
made the software you use aren't in business any more. It's easier to keep a
snapshot of what you're using that you know works... on an ongoing basis...
than to have the occasional chinese fire drill when you have to track down the
retrocomputing site that happens to still have a partial mirror of the website.

I wish I'd done that when I could still get NeXTstep software.

> > The 8-step procedure is easier for newbies than "apt-get install firefox".

> Yes. But this way, they will forever stay newbies.

You can't be an expert in everything. People buy Macs because they don't want
to be expert computer dudes. Some of them end up learning quite a bit anyway,
because they find something like scripting that's useful and challenging.

If if they ARE only scripting PHP or Applescript, they're ahead of someone
who's an expert in software installs.

There's stuff above here

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