5 ms·

I think the web people have the right idea. If it hurts, do it more often [1], right? I've used Debian for a long time (edit: on servers), but the short (and i

I think the web people have the right idea. If it hurts, do it more often [1], right? I've used Debian for a long time (edit: on servers), but the short (and in some cases getting shorter) release cycles of popular projects like Chromium and Rust have got me wondering if Debian just moves too slow. I'm tempted to try using Fedora as a container base image and see if it's practical to keep up. Edit: I guess Fedora is no worse than Alpine if you actually update to each new major release quickly, since they both release every 6 months. [1]: https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FrequencyReducesDifficulty.html https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/FrequencyReducesDifficult...

qwertox 5y ago
It is possible that if you build up a routine to always stick to the latest, it will become an automatism. This opens the door to several types of risks. Containers are always an option.
miohtama 5y ago
Static binaries like Snap, macOS, etc. solve “moving slowly” issue. There should be little need to update the core OS (kernel, initd, /etc stuff) often.
murgindrag 5y ago
No, the web people have it wrong. It's called: - Failure to do upfront design (yay, misinterpreted agile/MVP/etc) - Reinventing wheels over, and over, and over Newer versions and frameworks tend to be 10% improvement, and 90% unnecessary churn.
- asddubs 5y ago
  I'd say PHP is still getting a lot of good and important improvements
  - murgindrag 5y ago
    PHP exactly makes my point. PHP was a no-good, terrible, poorly-made, horrific original design for something like powering Facebook. As a result, it needed a lot of good and important improvements. Or to be more specific, it was a great design for what it was intended to be: a pet hobby project to make it easier to make Personal Home Pages, and was never intended to be a programming language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Early_history The concept of putting out something this bad, and then refactoring for over a quarter-century to make it almost-usable, is exactly the definition of the webdev way. The result is a ton of churn.
    - asddubs 5y ago
      sure, I won't disagree with that, my point was more that the updates are more than 10% useful features usually. You can definitely make a point about how long it took php to get its type system into shape, but php is not exactly just some trendy framework of the week, and there are valid reasons to pick php as your language of choice (namely that it's the lowest barrier language especially for having non technical people do their own installation on some random server/shared hosting)
      - murgindrag 5y ago
        Seen locally, all improvements are useful. PHP is better each year. Seen globally, it's 10% improvement and 90% churn. One "improvement" is a half-fix, another is another half-fix, and so on, where after 5 improvements you're 97% of the way there. In the meantime, you've broken backwards-compatibility five times, perhaps not always in the literal sense (old code still runs), but in the practical sense (old code has to be rewritten to follow modern conventions and be compatible with new code). You've also had five learning curves. And you have a ton of legacy stuff to support, from each of those five changes, leading to an almost unbounded explosion of complexity.
    - edoceo 5y ago
      And we've been making the same "mistakes" with JS too! But if PHP and JS are so shit and full of churn, why are they so popular and widely used? And have been used to build larger, globally successful projects?
- tpetry 5y ago
  PHP and PostgreSQL get a big release every year with good improvements. That you have to wait for the next stable release of debian (or in this case the one after this because they did not upgrade to the newest one) is not a failure of the web people! We are talking about one release every year, not every few weeks! Getting them years later just shows how unrealistic sometimes these stable distros are.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > We are talking about one release every year, not every few weeks! Getting them years later just shows how unrealistic sometimes these stable distros are. * https://deb.sury.org https://deb.sury.org * https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt There are times when I want slow movement, and times when I want fast movement. Debian allows for both.
    - tpetry 5y ago
      Sure you can use external repositories. But why bundle old packages when everyone then has to use external repositories to not get really old versions?
      - throw0101a 5y ago
        Testing for one: * QA to make sure all the interdependencies aline correctly * making sure the upgrade process runs smoothly, and that going from version X to version Y of some package is well-tested It also depends on the upstream release cycle of the software package. The distro may wish to use the LTS version software (e.g., OpenJDK, OpenZFS, Django, Zabbix) but developers may wish to be more bleeding edge for new functionality.

qwertox 5y ago

It is possible that if you build up a routine to always stick to the latest, it will become an automatism. This opens the door to several types of risks. Containers are always an option.

miohtama 5y ago

Static binaries like Snap, macOS, etc. solve “moving slowly” issue. There should be little need to update the core OS (kernel, initd, /etc stuff) often.

murgindrag 5y ago

No, the web people have it wrong. It's called: - Failure to do upfront design (yay, misinterpreted agile/MVP/etc) - Reinventing wheels over, and over, and over Newer versions and frameworks tend to be 10% improvement, and 90% unnecessary churn.

asddubs 5y ago
I'd say PHP is still getting a lot of good and important improvements
- murgindrag 5y ago
  PHP exactly makes my point. PHP was a no-good, terrible, poorly-made, horrific original design for something like powering Facebook. As a result, it needed a lot of good and important improvements. Or to be more specific, it was a great design for what it was intended to be: a pet hobby project to make it easier to make Personal Home Pages, and was never intended to be a programming language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Early_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Early_history The concept of putting out something this bad, and then refactoring for over a quarter-century to make it almost-usable, is exactly the definition of the webdev way. The result is a ton of churn.
  - asddubs 5y ago
    sure, I won't disagree with that, my point was more that the updates are more than 10% useful features usually. You can definitely make a point about how long it took php to get its type system into shape, but php is not exactly just some trendy framework of the week, and there are valid reasons to pick php as your language of choice (namely that it's the lowest barrier language especially for having non technical people do their own installation on some random server/shared hosting)
    - murgindrag 5y ago
      Seen locally, all improvements are useful. PHP is better each year. Seen globally, it's 10% improvement and 90% churn. One "improvement" is a half-fix, another is another half-fix, and so on, where after 5 improvements you're 97% of the way there. In the meantime, you've broken backwards-compatibility five times, perhaps not always in the literal sense (old code still runs), but in the practical sense (old code has to be rewritten to follow modern conventions and be compatible with new code). You've also had five learning curves. And you have a ton of legacy stuff to support, from each of those five changes, leading to an almost unbounded explosion of complexity.
  - edoceo 5y ago
    And we've been making the same "mistakes" with JS too! But if PHP and JS are so shit and full of churn, why are they so popular and widely used? And have been used to build larger, globally successful projects?
tpetry 5y ago
PHP and PostgreSQL get a big release every year with good improvements. That you have to wait for the next stable release of debian (or in this case the one after this because they did not upgrade to the newest one) is not a failure of the web people! We are talking about one release every year, not every few weeks! Getting them years later just shows how unrealistic sometimes these stable distros are.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > We are talking about one release every year, not every few weeks! Getting them years later just shows how unrealistic sometimes these stable distros are. * https://deb.sury.org https://deb.sury.org * https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt There are times when I want slow movement, and times when I want fast movement. Debian allows for both.
  - tpetry 5y ago
    Sure you can use external repositories. But why bundle old packages when everyone then has to use external repositories to not get really old versions?
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      Testing for one: * QA to make sure all the interdependencies aline correctly * making sure the upgrade process runs smoothly, and that going from version X to version Y of some package is well-tested It also depends on the upstream release cycle of the software package. The distro may wish to use the LTS version software (e.g., OpenJDK, OpenZFS, Django, Zabbix) but developers may wish to be more bleeding edge for new functionality.