[CentOS] two cents or not two cents

Tue Dec 21 19:29:37 UTC 2010
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

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