On Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 2:24 AM Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, 2022-07-11 at 14:33 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
I always wondered about that "reinstall the software" thing.
I mean, how much should I trust software from someone who apparently is unable to just copy the software onto the disk?
And even worse, it actually works sometimes.
I use a very large and complex app with a Java GUI and heavy lifting done by open source libraries for a huge range of file formats, GDAL, and various numerical libraries. There are silent background downloads of "ancillary" files. Reinstalling is often needed when it breaks -- probably due to a corrupt file. There are versions for Linux, macOS, and Windows, but I don't see any difference across platforms so pretty sure there are glitches writing configuration files.
I'd come to a few conclusions regarding that:
Silent disk errors. Things disappeared without notice while writing, and/or later on. And checkdisk was fond of just deleting files it considered faulty.
Mangling of files read from disk. When you open a file, a file system can record when the file was last accessed. So what happens when it pokes the data on a file and has a crash? Can it destroy the file? (We're talking self-destructive MS file systems, here.) Why else should some .dll file disappear that *you* never had interaction with.
Race conditions. Some programming flaw got in the way of some write during installation, that didn't happen during the re-installation. Although that doesn't take into account things that worked, later failed, then got fixed by a reinstall.
I've seen many cases where users had started some GUI app from the shell then done <Ctrl-Z> in case they might want to come back to it, but end up leaving it suspended for days. Then they try to install an update and the problems begin.