np237 ([info]np237) wrote,
@ 2006-03-04 16:50:00
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Making fun of people is bad...
... but sometimes you just can't hold on.

Mike Hearn, author of the wonderful autopackage installation software - the one that's breaking your distribution by overwriting files installed by the package manager - has been entertaining me these days. After claiming to have "designed a versioning scheme" that he compared to ELF, he started a flamewar about how Debian likes to break upstream's software - without any relevant example so far. Interestingly, this thread also showed there are still some people to believe D.J. Bernstein's teachings can be useful.

His latest blog entry really made my day. After complaining about people not using autopackage enough (guess why), he started again to claim Debian is breaking upstream's software, with finally one example: the user-agent in Xulrunner being broken. A bug in the first public release of the package. Just like we didn't fix bugs...

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(Anonymous)
2006-03-05 01:14 am UTC (link)
He is a hilarious troll.

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ABI
(Anonymous)
2006-03-05 02:46 am UTC (link)
The whole thing has me siding with Linus :)

However he does appear to be dedicated to making GNU/Linux easier to use. As such you probably should try harder not to mock.

I think there are some fundamental differences of viewpoint. He does seem to be declaring Autopackage dead, which is something at least. But I think there is an element of those that don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it.

Personally I think anyone too committed to backward compatibility, should be forced to program IBM mainframes for a few months, ideally working with 24 bit assembler, JCL, and other such fun things.

Wisdom and intelligence don't always walk side by side.

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(Anonymous)
2006-03-07 10:29 pm UTC (link)
Hi Joss,

I'd like to comment on a few things. Firstly, autopackage doesn't overwrite files installed by the package manager - ever.

In the 1.0 series if a package conflicts it'll back up files that conflict, and put them back if you uninstall the autopackage. In 1.2 it stops and asks you to remove the pre-existing package.

The current backup behaviour isn't great, but autopackage is mostly designed for applications and we assumed the user won't install the same program twice. We changed the behaviour because it turned out that users who were coming from Windows assumed that installing one type of package would upgrade the other type so hadn't bothered uninstalling the old version before upgrading - oops! Still, no permenant damage done, just uninstall and your system is back to normal.

It is theoretically possible for dpkg to break a system with autopackage on, because at least last time I looked, dpkg doesn't really try and deal with the case of a package already being installed but not in its database. That's a shame because it was always a risk even before autopackage existed - some source tarballs are configured to install to /usr by default because otherwise they won't work properly (eg consider GNOME programs that install Bonobo servers). And personally I consider a program like dpkg/rpm that will silently overwrite files placed somewhere by the user to be buggy.

RE: The comments about ELF. Actually the versioning scheme I designed wasn't for shared libraries and I never said it was, but it could be applicable. ELF isn't /bad/ per se, after all the Windows and MacOS X alternatives don't win many awards either. But it would be foolish to think that no improvements can be made. There are lots of problems - look at the "LSB Futures" list archives from a few years ago to see people sweating over the symbol conflicts issue. Symvers were proposed as a solution, but as you know they didn't receive wide support for a variety of reasons (IMHO the GNU implementation has some fundamental design problems but that's a topic for another time).

RE: Flamewars. I didn't start a "flamewar" about how Debian breaks upstream software, I posted to a blog entry in which a Mozilla developer was publically complaining about the treatment of his work by Debian. Maybe I threw some fuel on the fire but I definitely didn't start it ;)

And finally we come to my blog entry. The blog entry wasn't complaining that nobody uses autopackage, actually we have a growing number of packages and a lot of very enthusiastic users. The problem is we have far more users than packagers. This is annoying because those users then email us all the time asking us to make more packages for them :)

The issues as to why only a few developers use autopackage are fairly complicated - given that I've talked to many people about this and you presumably haven't, I'd say I'm better qualified to talk about it than you. And as you noticed I'm happy to critically evaluate my own work.

Final point. As I've said elsewhere, I linked to that blog entry about user-agent being broken because it was the most recent example I knew of.

Consider:

* What if Mike hadn't blogged about this change? What if he was busy or didn't think it worth mentioning? The bug would have gone into Debian and probably not been noticed for some time, until one day a web server admin is trying to find out why a few % of his users are having problems.

* What if the change wasn't so clear cut? What if it didn't violate the HTTP spec but Microsoft IIS web servers couldn't deal with it? Would losing IIS interopability have been considered a bug or not?

* There are other examples of changes that were not publically announced and actually were only discovered after people (like me) dug through bug reports and did some remote debugging sessions.


I should probably be less aggressive in what I write. I've been a bit mean to Debian lately, mostly due to my bad personal experiences with the project. But you guys aren't really bad or crazy or evil, we're just a bunch of computer programmers who disagree. I'll try and keep that in mind in future.

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Very nice article.
(Anonymous)
2008-06-16 06:57 am UTC (link)
Very nice article.
I too wrote same topic. But your post is far better than mine :)
http://elechub.com/hide-shared-file-in-windows-xp-networking-tip/

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