Pete Zaitcev wrote:
I am quite surprised that it works for Microsoft, because Sun gave it
a good try. Maybe they just ignore most problems, like what happens
when you upgrade a well-patched system to the next release.
Microsoft ships a lot less software with Windows than Sun ships with
Solaris or Fedora ships with Linux. That's why these comparisons that
RHEL has 44 security bugs and Windows has 43 security bugs are a big
joke, because RHEL comes with 4 CD's of software and Windows only one.
I think the "incremental patches" could be dealt with in a way
that's mathematically well defined and wouldn't require thinking on
anyone's part (it's the thinking that gets you in trouble.) Imagine we
have a package with the following history
package-1
package-2
package-3
package-4
package-5
Now, we can generate something like xdiffs, so we have
package-diff-1-2
package-diff-2-3
package-diff-3-4
package-diff-4-5
these are actual diffs against the files in the filesystem. When
somebody installs package-1 out of the box, and then does an update,
the system can check that ~all~ files in package-1 are unchanged, then
it's safe to automatically download the diffs, which put the system in
the exact same state it would be in if we'd just installed package-5.
If any files in package-1 have been touched, then we have to do
something different.
I totally understand why this would be a nightmare for the mirrors, but
the current status quo is a disaster in terms of user experience. Every
time I do a Fedora install, I usually end up downloading 2 GB worth of
ISO images, and then I run "yum update" and it downloads another 1 GB
worth of updates.
My experience with RHEL is even worse than that with Fedora, partially
because "up2date" scales less well than "yum." Last time I installed
RHEL 4, up2date kept crashing, and I tried different things until I
realized I had to do updates to up2date and rpm to make up2date stable
enough to complete. I expect to have these problems with Rawhide, but
it's particularly irksome when the Red Hat Network (the product that I
perceive I'm paying a significant annual fee for) is the part of the
distribution which works the worst.
--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
