Matthew Miller wrote:
On Fri, Jul 28, 2017 at 10:11:53PM +0100, Phil Perry wrote:
The issue I have here is even if I did file a bug, and the issue were fixed, no sooner than it's fixed fedora updates to the next version and introduces a whole bunch of new bugs, and so the cycle continues. I played that game for a while with fedora core when Red Hat Linux died before settling on Enterprise Linux and have never looked back.
Sure; that's the tradeoff of getting new stuff.
But, I'm not asking anyone here to switch to Fedora. I'm asking (especially those of you who are professional sysadmins) to please look at the Modularity prototype.
Well, it might have some merits if it does work and makes its way into Centos because with Centos, I�m finding myself unusually often needing a more recent version of a package --- or something that isn�t packaged at all --- than is installed by default.
That leaves to ask whether making it easier to require users to have a mess of different versions of packages installed all at the same time or providing more recent packages by default is the better solution. Considering that not providing sufficiently recent packages apparently comes from a fear of breaking things, you need to explain how it is better to provide a mess of different versions of packages by default because doing that appears to make it easier to have things broken (by default), while making it much more difficult for everyone to maintain the distribution and their machines.
So in the end, how does it NOT make things worse? And that doesn�t even mention the necessity to fix bugs found in outdated versions of software. People might use them because they suddenly have become easy to install.
It COULD make things better when more recent packages could be installed AND made the default, already because it is unwieldy having to take care of using the right version of gcc and other things to compile software that isn�t packaged, which is unwieldy to begin with because you also need to keep it up to date. So instead of providing more different versions of the same packages, it might be better to package more different software.
Guess what, even nasm in Centos is outdated, and you have to enable yet another repo to get the current version, or install it yourself. That doesn�t go along well with the overrated fear of breaking things, not one way, nor the other.
You could even say this multiversion thing is about providing a way of breaking things, much like brokenarch was with Debian.