Comment by lnxg33k1
2 years ago
I am not sure how to handle this post, I guess that's the same for RHEL or LTSes, if you upgrade major OSes you might break things, stay on current versions in order to stay safe, should we freeze software because astrophysicists are too busy?
A rolling Linux distro would introduce minor, easy-to-address changes every now and then. This may be less pain overall (much like making many small pull requests vs one giant rewrite).
Disclaimer: I'm running a rolling-release distro (Void) since 2016, and has gone through 5 machines with it, usually with near-zero setup after a move.
I also am on linux rolling, I use gentoo on desktop and arch on laptop, I update, things break, it's my fault, but would use the same approach for major non-rolling OSes updates, the point was not the amount of breakage, it's the breakage principle in itself, I am not sure why OP was blaming maintainer for breakage of major OS updates?
>This may be less pain overall (much like making many small pull requests vs one giant rewrite).
Just shows how different people are in their approaches to dependencies... I can't imagine working like that, the idea that everything I'm using could break at any moment. I'd rather deal with those (possibly larger in number at one time) set of changes at fixed upgrade intervals, in exchange for having a stable system.
A stream of small changes is easier to migrate automatically, so you rarely see a need to update something by hand.
But when you do, the change is small, so you do your adaptation in 5-10 minutes, and continue with your day.
This is in stark contrast with upgrading from an LTS version, when the changes are sometimes drastic, and the changes are everywhere, so it takes some time to even figure out where to start. Because of that, such upgrades may be postponed, snowballing out of hand. I have a box that still runs old-old-oldstable Debian because of that.
A rolling release avoids this, while also bringing you fresh software faster. I get new releases of Gimp or Emacs within a week, and of Firefox, or stuff like git, usually next day.
I have a system that is rolling doesnt mean i work on rolling, that’s why virtualisation exist, i develop in containers that represent preference of clients
I don’t understand why they can’t suitably migrate things so they don’t break. They have kernel access to the system. It should be trivial to move whatever around that needs to be moved to carry on functionality.
I suspect it’s because they actually don’t know _what_ will break with what they change.
I think either of us misunderstood, I understood that the wife wanted the update to don’t trigger any changes to their existing tools, you said that it should be trivial to move stuff around, implying that some change would be needed, that is according to what i got, the point OP was complaining about? I agree with you anyway, at least mostly, should be trivial or not, I wonder how many people have a look at changelogs before updating and then go to blogs to complain, I dont use osx as a linux user, when i see something of interest in update packages i go to check the changelogs to make sure its smooth and almost never anything happen, so I don’t have much to complain
With the difference that major LTS upgrades happen much less frequently than major macOS upgrades.