On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 00:37 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
>
> > No disrespect meant to the AbiWord team, but I think autopackage is a
> > bad idea.
>
> Autopackage is a fantastic idea which allows the Abiword developers to
> provide one package to serve a wide audience. Less work on packaging and
> more work actually developing the software they care about.
>
> What is more Rob went to the trouble of creating Autopackages and he is
> perfectly entitled to spend his development time doing whatever he likes.
Yes, autopackage certainly does have distinct advantages over some other
methods, I won't argue that - and it certainly is useful for
distributions which do not package AbiWord or do not have current
releases available - and yes, he absolutely can do anything he likes and
I'm extremely grateful for AbiWord and the AbiWord team.
My problem with autopackage is that the benefits come with a trade off,
and that trade off is that you don't get the package dependency
mechanisms of the operating system, which means the operating system
package management system will allow apps to be uninstalled that are
actually needed by apps installed with autopackage, and an improperly
written autopackage (and there already have been some - afaik not from
AbiWord) can hose files that do need to be maintained by the
distribution package management system.
A real nice benefit of the package management system is that everything
can be updated at once, with vendor GPG signed packages - even scheduled
while you are off fishing. The more software on a system installed by
autopackage, the more software needs to be manually updated by the end
user, who may not pay attention to the security lists etc. or have a
clue that one of the static libraries foobar linked against has a
problem, thus foobar doesn't get updated.
However - AbiWord is their project, Autopackage is extremely useful for
distributions that don't package (or keep up to date) AbiWord, it's just
a difference of philosophy. I will continue to recommend against it
because I think it is potentially dangerous, but I do respect the right
for them to run their software project in the way that they best see
fit.
In this particular scenario, sticking with yum to update AbiWord was the
right thing to do, Fedora does package AbiWord and does keep current
with it. In fact, now that it is in Extras - it has been very good (when
it was in core, I'd rebuild the src.rpm myself when updates were made
available because Fedora rarely did ... it was almost like second class
citizen, which was too bad, because it IS the best Word Processor.)
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Received on Tue Sep 27 02:56:15 2005
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