4 ms·

Enough of this. People have the right to install last version of software easily without having to upgrade the whole server at once. ISV have the right to packa

by tacone 10y ago

Enough of this. People have the right to install last version of software easily without having to upgrade the whole server at once. ISV have the right to package their own software. If MongoDB is a commodity I can gladly stick to the distro version. If I'm developing something of more cutting edge I want and will install the latest version from the ISV repo.

insanebits 10y ago
Yes they can, there is nothing preventing them creating the package. But it shouldn't be a primary way of installing package. If you really need bleeding edge for development you can build it yourself.
- tacone 10y ago
  I'll just let my ISV do that for me, thank you.
- mtgx 10y ago
  This type of attitude completely ignores regular desktop users who may one day want to use Linux over Windows.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    A regular desktop user does not want bleeding-edge software; he will do just fine with last year's VLC. (A notable exception being the web browser.) The priority for a regular desktop user is a nicely integrated system, and that is something that ISVs cannot deliver because they don't know what to integrate with.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Except for the security stuff, i think many would be quite happy with last years Firefox, Chrome or even IE.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  Which is exactly why I've given up on desktop Unix. With Windows, instead of having to wait for the maintainers to declare a package worthy of their distribution, I can just run the vendor's installer, without any fuss or hassle. FreeBSD, IMO, gets packaging the most correct with separating user packages from the core distribution, but there are still times when they'll have an old version as well. Relying on a single app provider, be it apple or debian, is just silly.
  - jjnoakes 10y ago
    It's about trade-offs. There's no magic bullet (surprise!). For example, some folks hate the Windows way because it has drawbacks like a different installation look/feel/process for each application, there's no automatic updates (unless the application has it built-in, which most don't), there's no automatic dependencies (so each app installer has to bundle its own versions of things, which also don't auto-update), there's no single place to go to look for a program that does something you need, automated installations are hard, inconsistent, or non-existent, security issues are harder to deal with (some image library issues from many years ago are probably still in the wild, bundled into some old version of some application), ... Please keep in mind that "just silly" is just perspective and priorities.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      I still recall Microsoft finding some bug in their visual-c++ set of dlls. Problem was that just about nay software shipped with their own bundle of those dlls. So All MS could do was to release a scanner to look for faulty versions, and beg people to pester ISVs about getting updates.
cyphar 10y ago
Who said you have to upgrade a whole machine when updating a package? Literally every package manager worth its salt allows you to upgrade a single package. And you can usually specify what version you want too. Yes, ISVs have the right o package their software. But as someone who is both a maintainer of a free software project and packages software for a distribution, I can tell you that I definitely do _not_ want to deal with packaging for every distribution (especially if it's some magical "universal" package). I've used enough distributions to recognise that they all have differences that you really can't "just package for every distribution with one setup".
- digi_owl 10y ago
  > Who said you have to upgrade a whole machine when updating a package? Literally every package manager worth its salt allows you to upgrade a single package. And you can usually specify what version you want too. Only by playing musical chairs with the package names to avoid collisions. And that in turn complicates dependencies.
rekado 10y ago
You don't need to upgrade everything just to upgrade a single package. With traditional GNU+Linux distributions this isn't always quite true, because it's hard to install different variants side-by-side. With functional package management every application and library gets its own namespace. Installing something is a matter of picking individual items from their own namespaces and creating a profile, the union of all outputs of all packages that are to be installed. This makes it possible for users to install not only different major versions for selected applications but even variants of the same package (e.g. different configuration flags or different compiler). At the bioinformatics institute we are using this to provide scientific software to cluster users. With Guix, users can create custom variants with very little effort without affecting the system state or other people's software profiles. There is still a lot that can be done by improving package management systems. Giving up by going the route of appification (like it's done with Snappy or when Docker is abused as a packaging tool) is a bad choice, in my opinion.

by tacone 10y ago

insanebits 10y ago

Yes they can, there is nothing preventing them creating the package. But it shouldn't be a primary way of installing package. If you really need bleeding edge for development you can build it yourself.

tacone 10y ago
I'll just let my ISV do that for me, thank you.
mtgx 10y ago
This type of attitude completely ignores regular desktop users who may one day want to use Linux over Windows.
- majewsky 10y ago
  A regular desktop user does not want bleeding-edge software; he will do just fine with last year's VLC. (A notable exception being the web browser.) The priority for a regular desktop user is a nicely integrated system, and that is something that ISVs cannot deliver because they don't know what to integrate with.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Except for the security stuff, i think many would be quite happy with last years Firefox, Chrome or even IE.
Sanddancer 10y ago
Which is exactly why I've given up on desktop Unix. With Windows, instead of having to wait for the maintainers to declare a package worthy of their distribution, I can just run the vendor's installer, without any fuss or hassle. FreeBSD, IMO, gets packaging the most correct with separating user packages from the core distribution, but there are still times when they'll have an old version as well. Relying on a single app provider, be it apple or debian, is just silly.
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  It's about trade-offs. There's no magic bullet (surprise!). For example, some folks hate the Windows way because it has drawbacks like a different installation look/feel/process for each application, there's no automatic updates (unless the application has it built-in, which most don't), there's no automatic dependencies (so each app installer has to bundle its own versions of things, which also don't auto-update), there's no single place to go to look for a program that does something you need, automated installations are hard, inconsistent, or non-existent, security issues are harder to deal with (some image library issues from many years ago are probably still in the wild, bundled into some old version of some application), ... Please keep in mind that "just silly" is just perspective and priorities.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I still recall Microsoft finding some bug in their visual-c++ set of dlls. Problem was that just about nay software shipped with their own bundle of those dlls. So All MS could do was to release a scanner to look for faulty versions, and beg people to pester ISVs about getting updates.

cyphar 10y ago

Who said you have to upgrade a whole machine when updating a package? Literally every package manager worth its salt allows you to upgrade a single package. And you can usually specify what version you want too. Yes, ISVs have the right o package their software. But as someone who is both a maintainer of a free software project and packages software for a distribution, I can tell you that I definitely do _not_ want to deal with packaging for every distribution (especially if it's some magical "universal" package). I've used enough distributions to recognise that they all have differences that you really can't "just package for every distribution with one setup".

digi_owl 10y ago
> Who said you have to upgrade a whole machine when updating a package? Literally every package manager worth its salt allows you to upgrade a single package. And you can usually specify what version you want too. Only by playing musical chairs with the package names to avoid collisions. And that in turn complicates dependencies.

rekado 10y ago

You don't need to upgrade everything just to upgrade a single package. With traditional GNU+Linux distributions this isn't always quite true, because it's hard to install different variants side-by-side. With functional package management every application and library gets its own namespace. Installing something is a matter of picking individual items from their own namespaces and creating a profile, the union of all outputs of all packages that are to be installed. This makes it possible for users to install not only different major versions for selected applications but even variants of the same package (e.g. different configuration flags or different compiler). At the bioinformatics institute we are using this to provide scientific software to cluster users. With Guix, users can create custom variants with very little effort without affecting the system state or other people's software profiles. There is still a lot that can be done by improving package management systems. Giving up by going the route of appification (like it's done with Snappy or when Docker is abused as a packaging tool) is a bad choice, in my opinion.