Re: Upgrading without central packaging

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From: Michael G Schwern
Subject: Re: Upgrading without central packaging
Date: 14:53 on 23 Apr 2005
On Sat, Apr 23, 2005 at 08:16:32AM -0500, Peter da Silva wrote:
> >     apt-get install firefox
> 
> As I noted in another thread, I see that as a solution to a problem
> that doesn't need to exist. Installing and upgrading applications in a
> traditional UNIX environment has become quite hard. So a lot of effort
> has been put into making the hard easy. For different reasons, the same
> is true on Windows, and they've come up with a different way to make
> the hard thing easy.

I think you miss the point.  I share Juerd's hate for the Mac because I, too,
am I Debian user.  I see it even clearer because I use fink which gives me
apt for *some* of my Mac software.  Another perfect example is the CPAN
shell for Perl modules vs, say, keeping your Java libraries up to date.

Its not about making a single piece of software easy to install, that's
been done, its about making the entire system easy to keep up-to-date.
Once you can easily check what's up-to-date you no longer have people using
ancient, buggy versions of software just because they don't want/care about
doing the periodic chore of manually checking all their software.

"Update all the software on my machine" should be one command.  I don't care
how it does it, just do it.  I don't want to have to go look up and download
each individual piece of software.  Sites like macupdate and versiontracker
just reduce the constant on an O(n) operation (where n == the number of
apps installed) but it remains an O(n) task for the user.  It should be
O(1).  Most Linuxen, FreeBSD and Perl make it O(1).  Those systems all existed
before OS X did.  Apple should be able to figure it out.

No complex packaging system or registry is required because Apple already 
has such a system, the .app bundle.  It could have been something as simple 
as an extra file in the .app directory describing where to check for and 
download the latest version.  The details of this doesn't matter, its a long 
since solved problem.  Hell, if Apple were smart they'd provide a mirror for 
everybody who wanted one, like Debian and CPAN do, so you don't even have 
to worry about the author's download site going down.

A program then searches all .apps and .pkg receipts for these, checks each 
one against the named site and if an upgrade is necessary it downloads, 
mounts and copies the app.  Even if it didn't do the copy step--just check 
for what's out of date, download the new versions and mount them--this would 
be a Great Leap Forward in maintainability.  Make it part of Software Update.

Its a very rote task.  Computers are for rote tasks.  The most hateful
software is that which turns users into click-monkeys for computers.

There's stuff above here

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