[K12OSN] Release cycle too fast

Jim McQuillan jam at mcquil.com
Fri Apr 1 15:45:07 UTC 2005


Rob,

What you've described below is exactly how apt works with debian.

and I think that's how yum works on fedora.

Jim McQuillan
jam at Ltsp.org


On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Rob Owens wrote:

> I realize that I'm asking for a lot, and I don't want
> it interpreted as me being ungrateful.  I'm just
> trying to give input from the point of view of
> somebody who is primarily a user, and not an
> administrator.
>
> I realize that I can manually install packages, and
> even source if I need to.  I've done it before, but
> one of the really great things about linux is the
> automatic dependency-checking installers like apt,
> yum, urpmi (for Mandrake).  But keeping an old system
> up to date without that would mean being on an email
> list for every application that the old system runs so
> I could keep informed of security updates.
>
> Thanks for the explanation of applications, libraries,
> etc.  I'm still a bit confused about it.  I don't
> understand why this situation is not possible:  I'm
> running FC1.  Application "xyz" needs updating, but no
> packages are available because FC1 is unsupported.
> yum xyz2 to get the updated package from the FC2
> repository.  But xyz2 requires abc version 2.  My
> system has abc version 1.  yum uninstalls xyz1,
> uninstalls abc version 1, installs abc version 2, and
> installs xyz.  Of course, it also has to take into
> account what else depends on abc version 1 and upgrade
> that to a version that can use abc version 2.  It gets
> complicated, but isn't that what these packaging
> systems are supposed to do?  Conceivably, with enough
> updates, my FC1 system could become FC2.  At least
> that's the way it seems to me, so tell me why I'm
> wrong.  (I'm sure I am, otherwise we'd already be
> doing it that way).
>
> -Rob
>
> --- Petre Scheie <petre at maltzen.net> wrote:
>
> > When you consider that "an application" isn't really
> > a single entity but rather  a
> > collection of files--the main executables, myriad
> > support libraries, drivers,
> > etc.--updating even just one application isn't
> > updating just one thing.  And very often,
> > those support libraries and drivers are used by more
> > than one application--that's the
> > point of an operating system.  So, a problem is
> > found in one of the libraries, and a new
> > version is created that fixes the problem.  But that
> > change may mean that some
> > applications have to also be changed to work with
> > the new library.  Most distros come
> > with more than 2000 applications, many
> > inter-related. And many/most of those
> > applications are being further developed. In some
> > ways, it's amazing they don't release
> > new versions more often than they do.
> >
> > Having said that, you don't need to upgrade the
> > whole OS just to keep, for example, SSH
> > current.  You DO have to step outside the automated
> > tools the Distro vendor provides,
> > and go to installing the packages manually, but on a
> > 'older' system that is relatively
> > static--that is, you're not adding additional
> > functionality--that's not that hard.  I
> > have some RH 8 boxes in which we just upgrade the
> > SSH package as necessary.
> >
> > If you want to buy 'tires' for your
> > more-than-two-year-old system, and 'buy' is the key
> > word here, check out progeny.com.  For $60 per year
> > per box, they will provide patches
> > for your Red Hat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, systems, and other
> > custom platforms for a fee.  For a
> > business, it's a pretty good deal.  If you want FREE
> > updates you have to go where free
> > stuff is available, and that means things like
> > Fedora.  Perhaps linux usage will some
> > day reach a critical mass such that there will be
> > enough people involved that there will
> > be some interested in continually maintaining older
> > distributions for free.  But I
> > suspect that day is a ways off yet.
> >
> > Petre
> >
>
>
>
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