It's getting to be a very big problem with open source software. Andrew Morton who's the lead maintainer of the Linux production kernel has come out claiming that the kernel is getting too buggy. You may not call changing the name of a dependency a bug, but it certainly manifests itself as one.
MS desktop clients update themselves pretty seemlessly. Servers are getting to that level pretty quickly as well. I'm fighting an uphill battle trying convince my clients and peers to adopt open source software and they ask me why? Software that updates itself verses surely Linux hacks who put people down because they don't want to follow a complex 20 step process that's documented in 15 different places.
There's only a limited amount of space for various open source applications. They're pretty much commercial ventures now. There's a big push among packages like Fedora and Debian to virtualize installations with seemless state archival, recovery, and transitions. I suppose that may be more of an issue for the packager than the software developer. I predict that the packages that seemlessly update state across versions will be the only ones that exist in the future.
I guess administrators can make themselves feel important and smart by spending days messing with an update that should really only take a couple of hours, or maybe not even that long.
Joshua Goodall joshua@roughtrade.net wrote: On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 08:04:15PM -0500, Richard Laager wrote:
On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 17:41 -0700, Fred Harris wrote:
It's much cheaper just to pay a company like MS who take upgrade transitions seriously.
Right, because I know I always deploy a new MAJOR VERSION of software without testing it.
Please do not feed the trolls. They're quite capable of hanging themselves.
/k
-- Josh "Koshua" Goodall "as modern as tomorrow afternoon" joshua@roughtrade.net - FW109
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