F15 preupgrade: lots of uneraseable dupes

[Fernando Cassia]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 15:52, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is a fact.   There is a lot of empirical proof for this.  Scripts are
> good for single purpose small cases.  Once you want to deal with complex
> problems, a script won't scale.  Error handling isn't as sophisticated
> for instance.


I do not agree. A script can be as good with as good error-handling as
its programmer wants it to be. Plus as someone said, a script is
easier to fix (just edit it) compared to a compiled program (which by
itself could introduce dependencies problems).

Have you seen HP´s HPLIP installer in action? IT´s been a while since
I had to run it but I remember it checked for everything before
starting to works, things like "is cups available? check. What
version? OK. is a USB device present? check." and so on, all to
prevent the script from failing, and offering to download components
when some required components were required but not available.

(like I said, it´s been a while I think I was running Suse 9.0 back
then, but the complexity and well done design of the HPLIP install
script positively surprised me).

So I´d say that your statement that scripts are somehow inferior
solutions is a matter of opinion.

Isn´t yum a big python script, after all?.

FC