“help meee!!! yum broke my system!”
Mike’s past blog entry absolutely hit the nail. I too am a fellow Fedora 4 user. A few days ago I ran yum check-update. And look! Shiny KDE updates! Even though I’m an avid Linux user and developer, I really don’t care what version of KDE I have as long as it works. I type yum install kdelibs kdelibs-devel kdeblabla .... (I don’t type yum update because the Fedora Extras repository contains a broken directfb package!!!!) and an hour later or so it was installed.
A few hours passed. I got a phone call. “Go online on MSN”.
Huh? I didn’t shut down Gaim. Wait a minute, where did Gaim go? I don’t remember shutting it down. *starts Gaim*
A few seconds later -> instant crash. I restart Gaim, I talk to someone on MSN. As soon as they talk to me, instant crash. I can’t figure out the problem. gdb didn’t produce anything useful (it says abort() is called). I also tried to burn some DVDs – didn’t work, as k3b crashes at startup!! I then noticed that yum upgraded to KDE 3.5.
Moral of the story? Its just as Mike says, repositories cause a lot of problems. You would have thought (or at least, that’s what everybody tells me) that the distribution will guarantee that packages work well together. Nope, here’s one case so that myth has been debunked.
Everything works again. I search some Fedora forums and found out that I had to upgrade to the latest k3b (luckily they had an RPM for Fedora or I’d have to compile from source). I also managed to make Gaim not crash by upgrading to 2.0 beta (which has its own share of problems but that aside).
Back to autopackage
Is it Autopackage or autopackage? A few years ago, Mike said it should be autopackage, because he doesn’t want autopackage to become a brand, but rather a system component that seamlessly integrate in the system, and that the user shouldn’t even have to know that it exists. I wonder if he still holds the same opinion today.
Software installation on Linux
Sometimes I wonder whether Linux will ever succeed if things continue like this. One would think that people would be aware of the problems after reading all the complaints on Slashdot (“no Linux is nowhere near usable enough like Windows/OSX!!”). But apparently some people think in radically different way.
Is making software installation easy for the average user a good thing? I think so. My friend (who studies computer science by the way), who installed Linux recently, also thinks so. “Software installation on Linux is fucking hard” – so he said. But some people disagree. Notice the last post, by tomato. I said that autopackage is targeted at the average user, and he says that that’s an argument against autopackage! His philosophy is that average users should not be able to install software – a trained sysadmin should do that for him. “WTF?!” my friend said.
I wonder what will happen to Linux as long as people with that kind of mentality are still around.
Mike Hearn said,
December 23, 2005 @ 9:58 pm
Heh, it’s “autopackage” but that *is* an abuse of English grammar so I long since gave up trying to enforce that. A word all in lower case at the start of a sentence looks weird.
In hindsight, autopackage may not have been the best name for the project. It definitely beats GSM which was the original name though!