On Thu, 2006-06-01 at 20:59, Dave Miner wrote: > > The administrator would more than likely want to know that his impending > action is in fact going to break something, so that he can pro-actively > deal with the situation, either by not performing the action or > coordinating with the affected user(s) in some way. To me, this is how > your proposal might work in some large corporations:
The cynical might suggest that the administrative processes in some large corporations would be capable of defeating any proposal you come up with... > - I install Firefox 2 in my domain since the bundled version doesn't get > updated often enough Is this because the operating system does not support the possibility of multiple versions, or because the administration won't use it? > - Outsourced administrator blithely removes package on server with a > library my Firefox install depends on, without knowing that there are > any dependencies Did you install firefox on this server? Why are you running firefox on a server? Would the outsourced administrator behave any differently if they were aware of the dependencies? Why was the package removed when it might be used by something else (chances are, a 3rd party installation of firefox isn't the only thing that's going to break)? Why is firefox reliant on a package that might be swept away on a whim? Why is the set of installed packages being modified anyway? I used to manage a system with many hundreds of software suites, often with many versions. We had a good idea of the "official" dependencies, but it was tracking other dependencies that was more interesting. Often, 'ls -ultr' to see what was actually being accessed was the most useful tool. Often, I would be absolutely sure that there was no valid reason why something should be accessed, but it was necessary to track down what it was before wiping it from the system. (Erroneous LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings were one common cause.) > - Sometime later, I run Firefox, it fails. I'm smart enough to find the > actual Firefox executable, run ldd, and figure out which library is > missing; this is a bit beyond a non-engineer user. We have computers. They should do this. For one thing, software shouldn't ship with dependencies on components that are likely to be removed; for another, why can't software be self-healing? One concern I have is that making it easier to deal with breakage might encourage more breakage to occur in the first place. -- -Peter Tribble L.I.S., University of Hertfordshire - http://www.herts.ac.uk/ http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
