Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 19:02 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Applications and bundled libraries by Frej
Parent article: Applications and bundled libraries

You are picking the wrong distro, methinks. If you want the absolute latest source from the developer's keyboard, grab something like Gentoo or Arch. If you want to run something tested to death and guaranteed stable, pick some Enterprise distribution.

As a end user (and sometime sysadmin, and developer at times) I don't want some random developer dictating what version of their package I should run. I'm happy to run the development snapshots of some stuff at my own risk for non-critical use, but only thoroughly wetted and QA'd software on a enterprise distribution for real-world uses.

Sometimes I might decide that what the distro ships is too outdated, and (carefully counting in the extra cost of keeping track of upstream myself) replace selected packages with newer versions. But never across the board.

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Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 20:45 UTC (Thu) by Frej (guest, #4165) [Link] (2 responses)

Good questions, but ideally choice of distro shouldn't matter.

>You are picking the wrong distro, methinks. If you want the absolute latest source from the
>developer's keyboard, grab something like Gentoo or Arch. If you want to run something
>tested to death and guaranteed stable, pick some Enterprise distribution.
What if i want stable distro/system but with newest app a,b and c? And developer of a b or c
doesn't want to support N distros? They can just bundle the libs they need.

>As a end user (and sometime sysadmin, and developer at times) I don't want some random
>developer dictating what version of their package I should run. I'm happy to run the
>development snapshots of some stuff at my own risk for non-critical use, but only thoroughly
>wetted and QA'd software on a enterprise distribution for real-world uses.

I'm sure a sensible system would allow a user to refuse appliation updates.

>Sometimes I might decide that what the distro ships is too outdated, and (carefully counting
>in the extra cost of keeping track of upstream myself) replace selected packages with newer
>versions. But never across the board.

Nobody can argue with that, but the app developer still has to wait/hope for N
distros/packagers.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 19, 2010 18:16 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm sorry, but "stable distro" and "latest versions of A, B, C" just don't jibe.

Whenever I really needed installing non-official software like that, after much looking around I usually decided not to do it. And when I did, the "application A" for which I truly, really, no-other-option-works, had to get a later version it was something very localized (not exactly (pieces off) newest Gnome or KDE), and I installed that from source (and created a package for simple installation/update). The "dependency hell problems" mentioned mostly just weren't.

Where I did install a larger set of stuff was when we had Suns with Solaris, where many pieces were almost useless (like the infamous cc or its klunky sh, or its bloated beyond recognition version of X) . There the first step was what somebody called GNU > /usr/local (which did include X Windows, TeX and an assortment of other pieces). But it was still done carefully and as limited as reasonable.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 21, 2010 0:13 UTC (Sun) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link]

>I'm sorry, but "stable distro" and "latest versions of A, B, C" just don't jibe.

That is because in your mindset every application is inextricably part of The System. That isn't the way anyone thinks outside of the Linux ecosystem, and it's frustratingly difficult for one side to understand the other.

The average user wants to continue with the same stable system (with the appropriate fixes if they're towards the higher end of the average), but with the option of whatever software versions they choose. A Windows user doesn't expect that updating Firefox may require them to reinstall every other application on their system to support a complex web of interdependencies - the idea would be beyond ludicrous. This highly desirable goal is currently achieved by bundling libraries - perhaps it always will be.

It doesn't have to be that way, but the [overly IMO] rapid pace of Linux distribution releases means that having separate system and applications package trees would rapidly lead to massive combinatorial explosion.