Opinions on install early, often, & fsck the customer (was "enlightenment" )

[Collins]

On Sat, 13 Apr 2002 20:22:21 -0400 Kurt Wall <kwall at kurtwerks.com>
wrote:> Scribbling feverishly on April 13, Pam R managed to emit:
> 
> [whack]
> 
> > Don't forget the linux motto: "Release early, release often, and
> > fsck the customer"
> 
> I don't use software that evinces such an attitude, at least the
> third element. I hope that was written with tongue firmly in
> cheek...
> 

I think that attitude is not really totally written tongue in cheek,
and it applies to the whole linus-gnu-other supporting products
environment.  We can all remember the glibc updates that broke almost
every system they touched.  There have been a few linux gotchas in the
2.4.x supposedly stable release.  Now there's a new one with libpng.

I'm on gentoo which puts me a little closer to the bleeding edge than
I'd like to be.  gentoo has a wonderful feature called "emerge
--update world" which looks through the portage catalogue and attempts
to apply everything that offers a newer version in the right sequence
to satisfy dependancies.  This works like a charm, until the latest
libpng upgrade came along, which broke every X program that uses
libpng.

Quite a few of us learned this after the fact, i.e. the hard way.
"...this is a libpng problem. Details: we upgraded from libpng 1.0x to
1.2x. These are API compatible but not binary compatible and,
unfortunately, cannot be installed side-by-side. So once you update to
the newer libpng, you have to recompile every single application that
links against libpng. That, unfortunately, includes every single KDE
application. "

Added for emphasis: also mozilla, xfce, gnome apps, sylpheed, almost
anything that displays image files.

gentoo developers should have known, but libpng developers should have
announced this to the world in big flaming letters.

Fortunately, I was able to fix xfce and sylpheed fairly quickly.  I
doubt that I will choose to remain up to dated again any time soon.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area - WWTLRD?
Gentoo_rc6-15(1.1a) 2.4.19pre - kde3 + sylpheed