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> What Debian and Fedora have been doing is a big step backwards, this whole 'unbundling of dependencies' (that were going to be statically linked anyways) need
by brnt 2y ago
> What Debian and Fedora have been doing is a big step backwards, this whole 'unbundling of dependencies' (that were going to be statically linked anyways) needs to die.
They, and most others, have been doing that since their respectively beginnings, and for good reasons: everybody expects distros to fix security issues, which is greatly aided by ensuring an-as-small-as-necesary dep tree and thus a single version of any particular dep.
Changing that isn't impossible, but I am not aware of any distro that's managing this and be widely considered 'stable'.
How can distros change while keeping up their end which is stability and robustness in the face of bugs and security issues?
- cesarb 2y ago> They, and most others, have been doing that since their respectively beginnings As I explained on another comment of mine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41409199), it's not since their beginning, but since a particular zlib security incident which showed them the risks of vendored libraries. Any discussion of vendoring policy which does not consider that incident is necessarily incomplete.
- brnt 2y agoHow long ago was that? And did they quantify the problem?
- koverstreet 2y agoThat's very nearly a solved problem at this point; I get notified by bots (github, mainly) if a dependency has as a security vulnerability, and then it's very nearly a one click action to do a cargo update and commit the new lockfile. The distro people could've been working on the tooling for automating this at the distro level (and some people in debian are doing work that would enable this); we don't need to go this insane "unbundle everything" route.
- brnt 2y agoBefore broadband, and before forges like github with free CI and bots, which is all fairly recent, distros packaged everything was a godsend, not insane.
- IshKebab 2y ago> everybody expects distros to fix security issues IMO this is a huge mistake in the Linux distro world. It doesn't scale. It's similar to the weird idea that Debian should contain every program in the world and if the authors want their programs to be installable on Debian they must make a Debian package for it. And Fedora and Arch and Gentoo and... Clearly bonkers.
- brnt 2y agoDebian does not prevent you from installing stuff from elsewhere, it's just that their packages come with certain availability and stability guarantees. You may not care for them, but clearly bonkers it is clearly not.