Re: Upgrading without central packaging

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From: David Champion
Subject: Re: Upgrading without central packaging
Date: 23:25 on 23 Apr 2005
* On 2005.04.23, in <20050423214914.37014413C6@xxxxxxx.xx.xxxxxxx.xxx>,
*	"Peter da Silva" <peter@xxxxxxx.xxx> wrote:
> 
> of some of that crap because at some point they made some incompatible
> API changes and so different apps depended on different versions.

Right there.  That's the #1 reason why I never, never want my
software maintenance to depend on "apt-get upgrade everything you
see".  But even if that's fixed in some far-off dreamy version of
$crackheaded_os_of_the_decade, none of you will ever convince me that
one's entire OS ought to work this way.  Nor one's entire perl, for that
matter.  There are too many sources of authority for the dependencies
to be managed in one clearinghouse.

That said, I'm moderately happy with Software Update.  It only updates
things within its own domain of authority, and that's fine with me.  A
preference pane I could open up to find out what's new among all my
installed applications, and choose which ones to update today, that
would be nice too.  But "be smart for me"?  No, thanks.

I've seen this scenario: something had to start working, I didn't have
time to mess around, I needed results, but I also needed to update a
few packages on my Debian system to get there.  It's rather infuriating
to do an update and find that the system's dependency tracker has
decided to swap out 70% of your OS, leaving fragments behind, or leaving
multiple versions behind, or removing applications I used that no longer
had dependencies supplied by the current set of provisions.... and to
still need to get work done ASAP.

I'll take linux kids whinging over how omfg 3 years out of date my xyz
is any day over that.  Cause you know, my xyz still works.  And half of
what you'd have me install, I've never heard of and will never find a
use for.


I miss filesystem versioning.  Metadata in the filesystem or not, at
least it was harder to produce an excuse not to use it.  Unix would
still have found a way to make it useless, though.  The #! should have
died in a dark corner decades ago, but nobody ever met the versioning
requirements to kill it.

-- 
 -D.    dgc@xxxxxxxx.xxx        NSIT    University of Chicago
There's stuff above here

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