On 12/21/2010 1:06 PM, Sean wrote:
>
>> If you can treat something as a black box and trust it, the size of
>> the component isn't that important.
> "If" or "IFF" ..(IF AND ONLY IF)..? A deep scepticism forces me to
> treat all boxes as grey no matter how long since last visited...
> (including my own, which are a sort of dark grey!?).
Yes, especially my own. That's the value of using components that are
maintained by others and widely used. The code gets much better QA
than I could ever do myself and all you have to do is peek at the mail
list once in a while to know if previously-working interfaces are going
to be broken if you update. For things from the base CentOS package
repositories and to a slightly lesser extent EPEL, you can assume
someone else has already made sure that the updates aren't
behavior-changing and required dependencies are met.
Java stuff seems to be more self-contained so there is a little more
freedom to mix component versions between applications and you aren't
completely tied to someone else's update schedule.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com