[BBLISA] Unix package management

[Dean Anderson]

This is a hard problem to solve in general. apt and yum really aren't 
capable of dealing with this well. Sun pkg is worse. 
But it definitely demonstrates what is wrong with upgrading everything 
automatically.  

There are basically two approaches to upgrades and patches.  The
conservative approach is only take a patch if it fixes something you are
having a problem with.  The liberal approach is take everything and back
out when it breaks.  Obviously (now in retrospect), you've discovered
the problem with the liberal approach.  But it isn't entirely your 
fault. The packager should know about serious incompatibility and 
can prevent upgrades by increasing the dependency checks.  The package 
distributor can notice that the new package won't run on installed 
systems and take it out of the upgrade set.  So its everyones fault, and 
thus, no ones fault. Users are scrweed...

I think this problem could be fixed, but dependency checking would have
to be built into the toolchain, the build system, and target system,
along with incompatibility marking. "What files did I use to build, what
files do I have now, does the difference matter?"  Its a hard thing, and
even that might not really be enough. As you might notice
"incompatibility marking" is a huge arm-wave for human effort to say
basically 'this breaks that', which might just put everything back were
it was before all the toolchain changes. Sigh.

		--Dean 

On Fri, 16 Apr 2010, Toby Burress wrote:

> So today ClamAV upgraded its database so that software versions < 0.95
> can't read it.  It turns out that the version of ClamAV in Debian "lenny"
> (the current stable version of Debian) is 0.94, so in simply upgrading
> my packages with "apt-get" I scrweed my users.
> 
> (The current stable version of ClamAV is 0.96.)
> 
> I was wondering what the opinion of The Internet is on this.  Is Debian
> being in any way a turd for distributing such antediluvian software,
> or is this all my fault?
> 
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