On 04/03/13 02:51 PM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
On Thu, 2012-12-06 at 07:06 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Thu, 2012-12-06 at 15:30 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
IMHO use of software collections is a symptom of a badly run organisation
not devoting enough cycles to maintain the software it uses, and hoping
(as in wishful thinking) no problem will go critical before the product
they built on top of those collections is end-of-lifed
I completely fail to see how entities with that problem will manage to
maintain the package number explosion creating software collections will
induce.
On the one hand, I agree completely - I think the 'share all
dependencies dynamically' model that Linux distros have traditionally
embraced is the right one, and that we're a strong vector for spreading
the gospel when it comes to that model, and it'd be a shame to
compromise that.
On the other hand, we've been proselytizing the Java heretics for over a
decade now, and the Ruby ones for a while, and neither shows any signs
of conversion or just plain going away, so we may have to call it an
ecumenical matter and deal with their models somehow. Sucky as it may
be. I don't know, I'm a bit conflicted.
It's interesting that you call out Java and Ruby folks as being
heretics. I guess that means all is kosher with Python?
Holy four month old thread revival, Batman!
Why yes it does indeed mean that, since as you know, anyone in Fedora
will tell you that I am _the_ person to go to for an encyclopaedic
knowledge of software development, seeing as how I am the QA monkey,
don't know how to write code, and don't develop any software ;)
(That was a snarky way of saying, no, it doesn't mean that, it just
means I was not aware of any issues like the one you describe below.)
OpenStack is getting burned by API instability in some Python packages,
so I've started a thread on Python's distutils-sig to try and guage the
level of heresy amongst Python folks :)
Two things I'm picking up from the thread:
- A trend towards "semantic versioning" and, implicit in that, an
acceptance of API breakages so long as the major number of a library
version is incremented
- Supporting the parallel installation of incompatible versions of
libraries isn't seen as an issue because you can "just use virtual
environments" ... which amounts to Python Software Collections.
The combination of those two things suggests to me that the Python world
will start looking a lot less sane to packagers - i.e. library
maintainers breaking API compatibility more often and assuming we can
just use SC or similar to have multiple incompatible versions installed.
Well, that sounds pretty bad. You may sign my name to the "Less Of This
Nonsense" petition with my blessing...
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net
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