On 03/16/2015 07:57 PM, Chris Angelico wrote: > But the solution isn't necessarily to throw out the packaging system. > All you need is to expand it.
Yes. And of course that's exactly what Poettering is talking about in his paper. Despite what many think of him, he's a deep thinker and it's worth reading what he says about this. > I don't know how you do it with yum, but > with apt, you simply add something to /etc/apt/sources.list (or the .d > directory), grab your index files, and install. That's how I install > PostgreSQL on Debian Wheezy; the Debian repos ship Postgres 9.1, but > by simply adding the apt.postgresql.org repo, I can grab 9.4 using the > exact same system. Ubuntu's PPA system achieves the same thing, as > mentioned, but even without PPAs, you can still have multiple > repositories. PPAs are problematic from a trust point of view. They aren't a whole lot better than installing random installers on windows. > The hardest part is managing library versions, and that's always going > to be a problem. Sometimes the latest version of an application > demands a newer version of a library than you have, and if you upgrade > that library, you might need to upgrade a whole lot else, too, so you > may as well upgrade everything and call it a new version of the > distro. Again this is the core issue that the Poettering crew at RH is working on. A cross between images and OS X's framework system. > The versioning problem is just as much an issue no matter how you try > to cope with it. Package managers can't magically solve everything, > but they can make a lot of jobs easier, so on that basis, I say > they're beneficial. We don't need a 100% solution to be able to make > use of a 90% solution. I agree. Though if I was a developer trying to ship a large package like LibreOffice, I would be very frustrated though. Certainly if I was a commercial app developer, this is a huge stumbling block. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
