[olpc-software] Package manager stuff

[Alan Cox]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 07:57:30PM +0000, Mike Hearn wrote:
> You said that watches on union mounts were racy, but the union mount
> wouldn't be watched itself. Physical directories would be. Unless the
> problem is that any union mount anywhere in the system totally screws up
> file monitoring, even of independent branches.

Ah but the existing applications don't know that. So if you watch one directory
in the file manager and you edit the underlying view what occurs. Then there is
the whole problem of union mounts of an underlying changing network file
store, which raises horrible questions about semantics and which the FUSE
work just armwaves.

> > "DLL hell"
> 
> DLL Hell is something like the blue screen of death: it's not been a

Must be a different planet to the one I live in. 

> If the project can't commit to reliably versioning updates such that a
> named interface corresponds with the behaviour an app expects then it's
> not a platform. But I think it can make this commitment, especially as

That rules out libjpeg, openssl, python, perl, the kernel and many other
rather important components. It also ignores the fact it will occur by
accident even with testing tools, and that that ABI/API is only half the
problem, apps break because of assumptions about internal behaviour that
is inevitably observable in things like callback order, or by doing invalid
things that "used to work".