Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 28, 2012 15:21 UTC (Tue) by Sho (subscriber, #8956)
In reply to: Various notes on /usr unification by sorpigal
Parent article: Various notes on /usr unification

Thing is, though, you're power user who is equipped to deal with the breakage in the event that it does arise, so it's a calculated risk for you. A distro may legitimately decide to care about serving users who aren't equipped for it. And in the face of the possibility of breakage, an upgrade process that tries to avoid it sounds like a good idea.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 28, 2012 23:37 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (2 responses)

If things get broken by the upgrade, users would simply reboot. And if the issue was the version skew you're worried about, that would fix it.

Does knowing how to press the power button make you a "power user"? If so, I weep for the future of computing.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 29, 2012 0:57 UTC (Wed) by mgedmin (subscriber, #34497) [Link] (1 responses)

If the upgrade crashes halfway through, there is a chance the machine won't boot.

A power user might fix it (dpkg --configure -a; apt-get install -f; apt-get dist-upgrade).

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Mar 4, 2012 6:25 UTC (Sun) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

And if a Boeing 747 crash-lands on top of the computer, that would probably be bad too. But how is it related to what we were talking about?

Just to be clear, the issue we were talking about was version skew in libraries causing applications to misbehave during the upgrade.

Various notes on /usr unification

Posted Feb 29, 2012 13:21 UTC (Wed) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link]

You're not wrong, but I find myself wondering whether, if we've come this far without really trying, it might not be worthwhile to test for this usage and make the "unequipped" users able to do it in relative safety.