On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 04:33:18PM +0200, Milan Jurik wrote: > Huf? What? Scripting is not evil, but its supporting tools need to be > improved.
Scripting isn't evil, per se. But it's far too unconstrained. You can't know what a package is going to do without installing it. You can't properly uninstall a package or back a patch out unless the scripting used for installation is perfectly reversed. If you constrain the number of scripts that get run, and maintain their forward and reverse actions in concert, then you've got a case. But when every package, every patch has its own arbitrarily large set of scripts, you get the ungodly mess we have today, where a small handful of patch gatekeepers are kept chained to a wall so that the KU can be released, eventually, in non-broken form. We've been doing that for years, and it's just not scalable. Tools aren't going to help the fundamental problem. > Software packages are infinitely variable, their installation requires > many different actions. So your proposal counts with future workarounds > by design... Most software packages needn't be infinitely variable. There's a reasonably compact set of things that most packages want to do. The rest we hope to solve with solutions more creative than brute-forcing each individual case with an arbitrary program. Danek
