Bdale writes: > [lots of stuff] > I haven't thought this all the way through, and don't have time to do so for > another week or three, but my experience is that when we try to soften > transitions like this (where "we" means the software community in general), > we generate just as much frustration as we avoid...
I disagree, particular wrt Debian. Throughout our history we've made it a technical goal to have a distribution that can be upgraded incrementally (meaning you can take bits of the upgrade and leave others), in place (meaning you don't need to do a reinstall), and with the system up. I think these are very good goals, and by and large we have achieved them - we're probably the only Linux distribution to have done so, and I'd be surprised if many commercial Unices even tried it. The libc6 stuff is being so difficult because for obscure reasons the two don't coexist nicely. Hopefully by the time we get to libc7 this will have been fixed in ld.so or wherever and we can avoid having to rename all our libraries. I think that the way we handled the a.out to ELF transition was very nearly a model exercise. The latest Debian systems can still install and run packages with a.out programs. I think this is very good. We provide stability in a world which (particularly in the case of Linux) is always changing. We've moved directories before - way back we moved /var/adm to /var/log, and the amount of hassle was minimal. Ian.
