Re: EPEL support in "master" branch (aka speeding up Fedora development)

[Tomasz Kłoczko <kloczko.tomasz@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 20 January 2018 at 12:58, Richard Shaw <hobbes1069@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[..]

%if 0%{?fedora}

Recommends: ...

%else

Requires: ...

%endif

does not hurt readability much.

WIth large libraries that are already complicated that's more difficult, but in that case major updates are discouraged within a release and all but banned in EL so there's not much need or advantage to keeping the specs in sync.

Did you heard about something like "dealt by thousands cuts"?

Sometimes this term is used in case of systems complexity or software development.

It is kind of analogy to cutting elephant skin using razor.

Try to imagine what may happen if you will do elephant skin small cut ..

Because it is big animal probably it will not even notice this however if you will repeat this thousand times it can kill even elephant.

There are other not nice consequence of such state after all those "cuts". When you will repeat such small cut thousand times there is no single/simple thing which you can do to "heal elephant" or to improve state of some software or fix state of some computers env.

As long as after thousands cuts elephant will be dead in case of software or system administration still it is possible to "heal" everything.

Only way to improve something is undo all those "small cuts" or things (quoting you) "does not hurt readability much".

Repeating some very small incorrectness is very misleading thing because every time when you will be doing this you will be not thinking that you doing something wrong.

It is like slicing salami sausage. Because salami is hard it is not easy to cut thick slice however it is quite easy to cut thin slice.

When you will do this one time probably no one will even notice that you eat small piece. So now try to repeat the same many times ..

Try to have look on one of the spec files with top number %ifings.

If you will do this I'm 100% sure that you could be able to say "It hurts readability to much".

kloczek

-- 
Tomasz Kłoczko | LinkedIn: http://lnkd.in/FXPWxH

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