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Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycleBeyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cyclePosted Mar 10, 2011 22:26 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227)Parent article: Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle
And this is why the traditional distro package model is entirely broken by design. The application vendors should be responsible for packaging and distributing their applications. Preferably just once rather than 60 times for 60 different distributions.
Red hat, fedora, debian... None of them should be shipping 50,000 packages, as the vast vast majority of those should be upstreams responsibility.
Yes, distributions currently apply a lot of fixes to upstream. Because they have to because they taught upstream to be lazy idiots. If upstream were forced to actually take responsibility for their software, then the software worth using would shape up (If nothing else, the hordes of duplicate package maintainers for an app could just go work on upstreams repo/packages directly), and the poorly maintained apps will die off like they rightly deserve.
There is not one single _real_ technical dilemma with this. Just lots of whining and screaming and idiotic rambling by distro developers that care more about their control-complex than actual usability or user support. All of the barriers to having upstream package their software and distribute it (with full cross-vendor dependency resolution) are artificial barriers intentionally created and enforced by the distribution developers.
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Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle Posted Mar 11, 2011 1:36 UTC (Fri) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]
> Yes, distributions currently apply a lot of fixes to upstream. Because they have to because they taught upstream to be lazy idiots.
Do you remember what life was like before the major distributions? (I don't mean to point to any particular conclusion by this. You just might find it interesting to look into.)
Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle Posted Mar 11, 2011 15:34 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] I agree, so long as upstream vendors agree to stay in compliance with Debian policy. Third party apps that crap all over my filesystem and do things their own way when a policy exists tend to get uninstalled rapidly.
Beyond Firefox 4.0: Handling an accelerated development cycle Posted Mar 11, 2011 18:53 UTC (Fri) by christoph_d (subscriber, #62481) [Link]
Then you have solved the problem on how to track fixes for all the software? I'm currently having >2k packages installed (and that's not much compared to some other of my systems) .. querying 2k websites/repositories for updates just doesn't scale up not even if it's automated in one single tool.
would be interesting how you are going to handle soname changes or want to ensure that applications are not using library versions where security support ended years ago
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