Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts [LWN.net]

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 21, 2012 18:05 UTC (Wed) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402)
In reply to: Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts by neilbrown
Parent article: Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Real package management?

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Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 21, 2012 19:24 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

no, package management varies drastically from distro to distro, what Android has is within the range of what 'traditional' linux distros support.

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 22, 2012 9:47 UTC (Thu) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link] (4 responses)

What all linux package managers generally have in common is they can manage the whole system. Not just a select group of end-user applications. Once you're on android 4.2 you're pretty much stuck on android 4.2 save for some strange update process that frankly you're lucky to get from your vendor/carrier.

As a user of debian systems that have been seamlessly updated through several releases this seems like the stone age to me.

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 22, 2012 9:54 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

it may be the stone age, but it's still within the array of linux distro management. apt has had upgrades between versions forever, rpm gained it recently, many other distros still require full installs to go to a new version

Recently?

Posted Nov 22, 2012 14:34 UTC (Thu) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

I've upgrade S.u.S.E installations since my first version which was 5.2. That was in 1998. This was coincidentally also the year when APT was released. So rpm based distros allowed updates "forever" as well. Most probably even with a definition of "forever" that is longer than the one for APT.

Recently?

Posted Nov 22, 2012 23:20 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Debian allowed upgrades from one version to the next even before APT came out. I have a Debian installation on one computer that I made around 1995 or so and have only upgraded since (with an occasional »cp -a« to a new machine). This includes upgrades from a.out to ELF and from libc5 to libc6.

On the other hand, doing SUSE upgrades was touch-and-go. For example, the first SUSE I had was 7.3, and going from there to 8.x was practically impossible. At the time even the SUSE people we had to deal with recommended doing a full reinstall instead, which went faster and broke less stuff.

Android 4.2, tablets, and related thoughts

Posted Nov 23, 2012 14:31 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

The devices we're talking about in this thread have all been Google Nexus products, not things locked down by a mobile telephone manufacturer or service provider. As a result the upgrades come at a fairly steady rate from Google.

I bought a Nexus 7 a while ago when I realised I would be without any of my computers for several days it has seen occasional use ever since. A while ago I heard about Android 4.2, and within a week of that a dialog popped up. Did I want to upgrade now, or would I prefer to do so in my own time? I was busy, so I picked later, and some hours later I remembered the offer, checked the relevant Settings page and updated.

One reboot later I was running Android 4.2. It was seamless, all my settings were left alone, everything was as I had left it, but now I had new features. One of the 3rd party apps I had broke due to some infelicity or other, it got an update later that week which fixed the incompatibility with 4.2, I would say that it was very like upgrading Fedora, except much faster and less scary.