On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > 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. Although sometimes the one finding the bug is *me*, or people like me. > 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. Hmm. Getting it to play nicely with others can be an adventure, particularly getting the bits installed cleanly. (Working on RPM for glassfish right now...)