On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 2:24 AM Tim via users <users@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 2022-07-11 at 14:33 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote: > > I always wondered about that "reinstall the software" thing. > > > > I mean, how much should I trust software from someone who > > apparently is unable to just copy the software onto the disk? > > > > And even worse, it actually works sometimes. > I use a very large and complex app with a Java GUI and heavy lifting done by open source libraries for a huge range of file formats, GDAL, and various numerical libraries. There are silent background downloads of "ancillary" files. Reinstalling is often needed when it breaks -- probably due to a corrupt file. There are versions for Linux, macOS, and Windows, but I don't see any difference across platforms so pretty sure there are glitches writing configuration files. > I'd come to a few conclusions regarding that: > > Silent disk errors. Things disappeared without notice while writing, > and/or later on. And checkdisk was fond of just deleting files it > considered faulty. > > Mangling of files read from disk. When you open a file, a file system > can record when the file was last accessed. So what happens when it > pokes the data on a file and has a crash? Can it destroy the file? > (We're talking self-destructive MS file systems, here.) Why else > should some .dll file disappear that *you* never had interaction with. > > Race conditions. Some programming flaw got in the way of some write > during installation, that didn't happen during the re-installation. > Although that doesn't take into account things that worked, later > failed, then got fixed by a reinstall. > I've seen many cases where users had started some GUI app from the shell then done <Ctrl-Z> in case they might want to come back to it, but end up leaving it suspended for days. Then they try to install an update and the problems begin. -- George N. White III
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