On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 18:46 +0000, Colin Walters wrote:
> For this reason among others I think we should move to installing
> updates immediately before logout/reboot.
Completely agree. FWIW, this is what most mobile "computers" such as the
iPhone and Android does. And, for the record, how OS X works too (unless
the only update is for an application like iTunes). They can of course
do this because they don't issue updates almost _every day_ (or what
feels like every day, anyway) like we do in Fedora.
So I segwayed nicely into this: I think another huge (and, I think,
well-known too) problem, which is related to this, is that we issue
updates way too often. A cause and/or effect of this is that our updates
(and main release) aren't really well-tested, at least not in my
experience. Another problem is that we're very militant in Fedora and
other distros with dynamic linking - while this sounds great on paper
(especially in 1990 when RAM was scarce), it does mean that if you
update a shared library you end up breaking many applications. There are
other downsides too, e.g. app folders. So it puts even more load on QA
that we don't really have.
Sorry if what I said sounds ranty and insulting to the Fedora community.
If it did, I didn't mean it. But I really really think that "how can we
make daemons survive lots of updates?" is the wrong question. The right
question, IMO, is "how can we ship software that doesn't need many
updates?". Which, of course, is harder to solve (the solution may
include a longer, more realistic release-cycle). But solving it brings
other benefits too.
These are tough questions. Not flamebait. Thanks.
David
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