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There are benefits that arise from solving problems of broken infrastructure. I think of them as downsides, even though there is something to gain. And there ar

There are benefits that arise from solving problems of broken infrastructure. I think of them as downsides, even though there is something to gain. And there are benefits that come from building good infrastructure. Those are upsides, as you don't take advantage of brokenness.

kbenson 8y ago
Sure, but that's all mostly a matter of perspective and context. What works for you, and provides an upside, may be almost entirely a downside for other people in different circumstances. From the embedded developer, to the home user, to the workplace, to the deployment of hundreds of systems, to the cloud provider that provides the infrastructure for hundreds or thousands of those large deployments, and all the steps between, each has a slightly different set of requirements. At some levels, and package management system from someone else is superfluous or cumbersome (Google is going to do their own thing for their custom installs), and at others, space really matters (e.g. small embedded devices). UNIX based systems are used at all these levels, and thus it makes sense that there would be little consensus as to the best way to do this specific thing.
- zzzcpan 8y ago
  I get it, there is no good or bad, people have different models of the world and all. But still, there are certain infrastructural things objectively necessary for security updates to make any difference. Doesn't matter if it's embedded, desktop or massive server farms. Updates still require management. Like it doesn't matter if an IoT vendor publishes updated .so files if you have to download and apply them manually to each device. So even if you have to work with broken infrastructure, you still have to recognize that it's broken to find a workaround. And convincing people about upsides of static linking is not the hard part, there is consensus. The hard part is merely making static linking work and realizing for how much stuff it can't be done at all.

kbenson 8y ago

Sure, but that's all mostly a matter of perspective and context. What works for you, and provides an upside, may be almost entirely a downside for other people in different circumstances. From the embedded developer, to the home user, to the workplace, to the deployment of hundreds of systems, to the cloud provider that provides the infrastructure for hundreds or thousands of those large deployments, and all the steps between, each has a slightly different set of requirements. At some levels, and package management system from someone else is superfluous or cumbersome (Google is going to do their own thing for their custom installs), and at others, space really matters (e.g. small embedded devices). UNIX based systems are used at all these levels, and thus it makes sense that there would be little consensus as to the best way to do this specific thing.

zzzcpan 8y ago
I get it, there is no good or bad, people have different models of the world and all. But still, there are certain infrastructural things objectively necessary for security updates to make any difference. Doesn't matter if it's embedded, desktop or massive server farms. Updates still require management. Like it doesn't matter if an IoT vendor publishes updated .so files if you have to download and apply them manually to each device. So even if you have to work with broken infrastructure, you still have to recognize that it's broken to find a workaround. And convincing people about upsides of static linking is not the hard part, there is consensus. The hard part is merely making static linking work and realizing for how much stuff it can't be done at all.