Modern Update System

[Benjy Grogan]

Please, this is ridiculous.  Of course it's possible.  You make a decision:
i) will a few patches be small/easy to install ii) should i generate a
unified patch for this user iii) situation is so bad, just send a whole new
rpm...  and there the repository has done some work and come up with the
best solution for you.  ... and yes, there are many more decisions.. such as
cross-package decisions etc...  but this is an absolute must for the next
gen linux distros.

What's Redhat doing?  What's Novell doing?

Microsoft has their solution, and there's a much better solution out there
for Linux.

... and the Anaconda idea.. where it checks to see if there is a new rpm
available before instalingl Fedora is good too.

Benjy,
AWWTF

On 11/28/05, David Hollis <dhollis at davehollis.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 19:23 -0800, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> > On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:55:11 -0500, David Hollis <dhollis at davehollis.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > I think there is a project that does this, and has been doing it for
> > > quite awhile.  It's called Microsoft Windows.  The problem that this
> > > method poses is that it's very easy to get to a point where you have
> no
> > > idea what the current real state of your system is. [...]
> >
> > Solaris used to have a similar system, where they had subpackages or
> > "patch" packages. IIRC, they got rid of it and switched to essentially
> > what we have now, for a few reasons.
> >
>
> Oh jeez, I totally forgot about that horrid mess!  It seemed like
> Solaris 2.6 was just a patched-to-hell-and-back Solaris 2.5, which was
> patched 2.4, etc on down the line!
>
>
> > I am quite surprised that it works for Microsoft, because Sun gave it
> > a good try. Maybe they just ignore most problems, like what happens
> > when you upgrade a well-patched system to the next release.
> >
>
> I wouldn't really say that it does work with Windows.  They are going so
> long between Service Packs these days that you wind up with somewhere on
> the order of half a million patches to install so the only way you can
> possibly keep up with it is to use Windows Update.   What if you aren't
> on the network (like a secured LAN or just a standalone box)?  You
> really can't go and find out all of the patches available and the order
> that they should be applied.  It's beyond human comprehension at this
> point.  Granted, the patch applier utils are supposed to take the
> version of the EXE or DLL into account to avoid overwriting newer ones.
> But with Windows' exclusive access issues, if you apply two patches that
> happen to update the same file, you can't really be sure which one will
> be the one that you wind up with after the next reboot.  It's black
> magic and pixie dust and all of that good stuff.  So in the end, you
> might have applied a patch and think that you are in good shape, but the
> other patch you applied actually downgraded you.  There isn't an easy
> way to tell you if you are really honest-to-god up-to-date.
>
> --
> David Hollis <dhollis at davehollis.com>
>
>
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