A Look At The Most Promising Next-Gen Linux Software Update Mechanisms

[Luke_Wolf]

The only way I can see you making such a statement for all distros is when you count yourself in as the source of the failure.

Oh Wise One, please tell me your magical secrets for running distro updates in place that include libinput or KDE S/ KDE Frameworks/ KDE Plasma and not breaking the running userspace.

[liam]

Nonsense. Being commercial doesn't make you worry more than anybody else. If anything does it mean you care less about the product and more about the money and the commerce.

The problem isn't that reboots are bad (although they can be bad for hardware and software), but it is unnecessary for most of the updates and invite laziness. Commercial enterprises as you call them do have the tendency to take shortcuts in order to get to their commercial goals, which is why still today Windows requires reboots for many of its updates. Microsoft simply never cared for it more than they felt they have to. It's the attitude, which needs to be fought here.

Before you disagree, better explain why OSTree needs reboots and Swupd doesn't.

Maybe you should learn a bit about ostree, and it's development, before you open your mouth?
You know what? NM. Don't answer this. I'm just adding you to my troll list.

[dragorth]

It would be cool, if modern package managers would be written in modern and more secure programming languages. Well, yes, one is writte in Go, but the rest still in C!
Hey guys, there is C++ 11, C++ 14 and rust, too!

So, let's get the logic fail out of the way first. This is simplistic thinking. You realize the kernel and 90% of the software you are running are written in C/C++? They are not more inherently insecure due to this. Most of them have had more testing on them than all those newer programming languages combined. So many more chances to find security problems.

Also, those shiny new languages all started out written in .... you guessed it, C/C++.

Now then, let's talk about tool usage. Some people use a hammer and a chisel to make the Statue of Liberty. They need different hammers and chisels than the ones that a hand crafted pottery maker uses. Some folks paint on dry canvas, and some on wet canva. Some write text files in the OS known as EMACS, for Vim's sake. Programming languages are tools that fit different niches. Some try to be soft hand towels, because the problems they work with only require a little elbow grease, but when you try to use them to do the heavy lifting, you have to do 10 to 20 times as much work as the languages that try to be brillo pads, that are made to get into the nitty gritty.

(And then you have C++ that has been used so often it has that it looks like that shop towel left in the back of the garage parts store that time time forgot.)

A good example of this is Regular Expressions. They are a programming language that is designed to do one thing quickly, and are great if you are looking for text in small documents. If your documents you are searching through are multiple millions with upwards of 100 million lines of code, you can get a much faster program by hand writing the code and tuning it to your problem set.

Most of the issues with updating software are on the lower level side of the equation. So the tools tend to use software for that reason.

Also, many of the newer languages are not production proven at that level. Rust claims to be able to handle low level hardware abstractions, but companies that use this stuff don't want their m/billion dollar business affected by the shiny new language.

[sdack]

Maybe you should learn a bit about ostree, and it's development, before you open your mouth?
You know what? NM. Don't answer this. I'm just adding you to my troll list.

The only troll here is a guy called liam, who is holding a list. Just don't tell him or he is going to be upset!

[pal666]

Management that is smarter than the engineers, listen to yourself :L.

not some random management and not than engineers, but the redhat management is smarter than some forum idiots like you

What are you talking about with this preboot stuff?

preboot stuff is early userspace

I come from gentoo land

who cares where you come from? how does it make software survive updates?

I only reboot because I am too lazy to type a few commands to update the kernel image on the fly and modprobe everything else in.

you can't update in-memory kernel except with kpatch and friends, no this is some crazy talk. btw, i also always do dnf update without reboots, but i am not random user

[pal666]

You don't believe RedHat could ever become like Microsoft?

why i should believe in random bullshit? redhat is the opensource company. all of their products are open source. unlike of canonical, google and most other "open" companies

[pal666]

Yet you believe what RedHat is doing has to be right, because it's RedHat who is doing it

well, i am not an idiot like you, i know that rpm itself does upgrades without reboots perfectly, but redhat is selling support and when clients come to them with borked upgrades, they develop robust upgrade method which is by upgrading in preboot environment

Just tell me at which point you threw out system uptime in favour of getting the latest software

i actually don't care about uptime. on the other hand i do care about latest features and fixes, though i routinely do upgrades without reboots. but hey, there is a slackware 1.0 just for you

And of course I must be living in an alternative universe, because what other reason could I have to disagree? Next thing you'll be telling me is that I'm unworthy of RedHat's glorious creations.

no, you must be living in an alternative universe, because your bullshit posts contradict reality

[pal666]

Which is not true for C++ and rust.

if i parsed this correctly, you just said that you don't understand c++

[sdack]

why i should believe in random bullshit? ...

You didn't answer the question.

By the way, don't call others idiots and then respond to comments like you couldn't read. You respond sentence by sentence as if you were climbing a mental ladder and had to use your finger in order not to lose the line you're reading on. Are your libs moving, too? ... Try to read comments as a whole, try to understand what is being said, then respond. It's not going to make your head explode, I promise.

[starshipeleven]

You didn't answer the question.

It was a "no".

By the way, don't call others idiots and then respond to comments like you couldn't read. You respond sentence by sentence as if you were climbing a mental ladder and had to use your finger in order not to lose the line you're reading on. Are your libs moving, too? ... Try to read comments as a whole, try to understand what is being said, then respond. It's not going to make your head explode, I promise.

0-content name-calling.