On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 07:35, David J. Orman wrote: > I'm asking about a compromise. Keeping software reasonably up to > date, at the same time not so bleeding edge as to it coring all the > time.
Coring isn't the problem (or shouldn't be - it's not an issue I worry much about). > Stable software, reasonably up to date, and a > *part* of Solaris. The trouble is that stability and up-to-dateness are conflicting goals. Solaris chooses stability. Now personally, I think they go too far, with a reluctance to update things because they *might* break things (rather than checking to see if they actually do, or even offering users the choice, but stability is one of the reasons current users are using Solaris inm the first place so shouldn't casually be thrown away) but the alternative of simply slapping on the latest version and ignoring all the breakage that results is also unsustainable. > I want (and lots of other people want) reasonably up to date software > that is stable Define stable. My definition is that changes to it have zero impact on other applications that use it. Otherwise, I have to revalidate or rebuild every piece of software on my system every time you update anything. > and monitored for security issues. Basically, what > Blastwave offers While blastwave does it, I can't use blastwave as a part of some other solution. And that's the problem with all the package management systems - they're fine, as long as you use them in complete isolation. The underlying problem is dependency hell. And Ubuntu/Blastwave/ whoever don't solve the problem - they hide it from the user and therefore don't encourage the community to solve the basic problem. As such, they only guarantee compatibility, consistency, and stability amongst in their own self-contained universe. On home machines that's probably enough, but it's certainly not good enough once you need to do something the repository can't. -- -Peter Tribble L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/ http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
