7 ms·

I can report the opposite - I've had to assist a fedora user when yum/rpm left them in a state that prevented a ton of new packages from being installed due to

by trotsky 13y ago

I can report the opposite - I've had to assist a fedora user when yum/rpm left them in a state that prevented a ton of new packages from being installed due to an interaction between the official fedora repos and rpm fusion, the repo everyone tells you to add to fedora to get video drivers and codecs etc. It was actually quite complicated to resolve as packages relying on specific libraries that were being held back had to be identified, removed, external repo removed, libs updated, packages readded, repo readded. All it took to get him in that state was copying a pasting a few lines thats suggested on every fedora forum, and a few unwise version dependencies in some official packages, and an external repo that falls behind the official one a fair amount. That is not a description of a well working system. And casuals frequently end up with tons of held back packages with apt because of not using dist-upgrade. I'm a heavy linux user and happily deploy it all the time, but to suggest that current package management needs no improvement is insanity. It's a highly advanced system of bandaids for decades worth of iterative engineering on a core design that predated shared libraries, CVE's and when update cycles were well longer than a year. A clean slate design would be an infinite improvement - it's just a crazy difficult problem without it basically being a new platform and requiring modifications to the 3rd party code that you're installing.

rbanffy 13y ago
> I can report the opposite For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly? > All it took to get him in that state was copying a pasting a few lines thats suggested on every fedora forum So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management. If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens?
- pifflesnort 13y ago
  > For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly? None. It built a massive teetering edifice of fragile interdependencies that incurs staggering human cost in maintenance, and has almost singlehandedly stood in the way of progress by third-parties that would benefit from working outside that system -- from commercial software vendors to OSS vendors that would prefer to be able to release versions on their own schedule. If it wasn't for package managers making it possible to maintain fragile dependencies in lockstep, Linux distributions would have been forced to confront simple issues like ABI and API compatibility, third-party distribution, and other basic facets of producing a user-friendly and vendor-friendly OS ... we may have even had a "year of Linux on the desktop" by now. Instead, we keep throwing humans at the problem of keeping the teetering pile of dependencies operational, largely because of people like you that cargo cult the ideas out of some strange combination of stockholm syndrome and a lack of vision for how things could be better. Why was anyone was surprised that Google threw away the entire Linux user-space when developing Android? > So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management. ... because that's the only way to achieve perfectly reasonable goals as a user. If I want to install Chrome, guess what it does? It adds an external repository that broke in strange ways when I updated Ubuntu. > If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens? Your microwave doesn't refuse to operate unless you only buy food that has been prepackaged by your microwave vendor, that can only be mixed with other food also repackaged by that vendor, and only if all the food has been pre-certified to work together in that exact combination.
- trotsky 13y ago
  For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly? Fedora systems often enter states where manual intervention with the package system is necessary to fix and issue preventing updates, they're usually just much simpler. And upgrading from major release to major release very commonly results in orphans or zombies. At least until the most recent release, the official instructions for resolving live upgrade issues involved 2-3 reboots and manual management of the package database in single user mode. So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management. If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens? No, it's the expected behavior of many fedora users and common among developers. Fedora has a zero tolerance policy on binary blobs and anything potentially ip encumbered. This is their arms length provider of such, and the official packagers will direct you there if you look to get your software included in the main repos but they have concerns about patent coverage. They rely on the use of that repo so much that they actually first shipped gnome 3 with the open source nvidia driver they shipped with blacklisted because of how bad it was, and instructed nvidia users to install the proprietary drivers to get a working system.

by trotsky 13y ago

rbanffy 13y ago

> I can report the opposite For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly? > All it took to get him in that state was copying a pasting a few lines thats suggested on every fedora forum So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management. If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens?

pifflesnort 13y ago
> For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly? None. It built a massive teetering edifice of fragile interdependencies that incurs staggering human cost in maintenance, and has almost singlehandedly stood in the way of progress by third-parties that would benefit from working outside that system -- from commercial software vendors to OSS vendors that would prefer to be able to release versions on their own schedule. If it wasn't for package managers making it possible to maintain fragile dependencies in lockstep, Linux distributions would have been forced to confront simple issues like ABI and API compatibility, third-party distribution, and other basic facets of producing a user-friendly and vendor-friendly OS ... we may have even had a "year of Linux on the desktop" by now. Instead, we keep throwing humans at the problem of keeping the teetering pile of dependencies operational, largely because of people like you that cargo cult the ideas out of some strange combination of stockholm syndrome and a lack of vision for how things could be better. Why was anyone was surprised that Google threw away the entire Linux user-space when developing Android? > So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management. ... because that's the only way to achieve perfectly reasonable goals as a user. If I want to install Chrome, guess what it does? It adds an external repository that broke in strange ways when I updated Ubuntu. > If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens? Your microwave doesn't refuse to operate unless you only buy food that has been prepackaged by your microwave vendor, that can only be mixed with other food also repackaged by that vendor, and only if all the food has been pre-certified to work together in that exact combination.
trotsky 13y ago
For every problem, how many times did package management work flawlessly? Fedora systems often enter states where manual intervention with the package system is necessary to fix and issue preventing updates, they're usually just much simpler. And upgrading from major release to major release very commonly results in orphans or zombies. At least until the most recent release, the official instructions for resolving live upgrade issues involved 2-3 reboots and manual management of the package database in single user mode. So, the user tried to somehow bypass the official distro package management. If you open up your microwave oven and electrocute yourself, is that because of a basic flaw of microwave ovens? No, it's the expected behavior of many fedora users and common among developers. Fedora has a zero tolerance policy on binary blobs and anything potentially ip encumbered. This is their arms length provider of such, and the official packagers will direct you there if you look to get your software included in the main repos but they have concerns about patent coverage. They rely on the use of that repo so much that they actually first shipped gnome 3 with the open source nvidia driver they shipped with blacklisted because of how bad it was, and instructed nvidia users to install the proprietary drivers to get a working system.