On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Cristian Rodríguez
How does this compare with openSUSE efforts to solve the same kinds of problem?
What is your specific question ? what has NIX a package manager done primarily for source based installations with the needs of openSUSE, a binary distribution ?
I ask because I've found myself in the situation described in the article: afraid to upgrade, because of past bad experiences and the knowledge that stuff I've built on my machine will break, and instead waiting for the next hard disk crash when I will have to reinstall anyway :-) On the other hand, I would be happy to hear that I'm being too pessimistic about the openSUSE upgrade process and why. How should one avoid dependency hell? Maybe I'm doing it all wrong. A simple example: I have an old SLES9 machine. It still works great and I use it every day. However, when I tried upgrading my Firefox 2.x to 3.x, it quickly became impossible and I gave up (there is no pre-built Firefox 3.x for SLES9 in OBS). I don't want to have to download the Firefox source and build it manually. Of course, you can forget trying to upgrade SLES9 to SUSE 11.x and have everything continue to work (why should I be forced to do that anyway?). So this is "the problem". More generally, I get the feeling that the openSUSE "power users" stay on the bleeding edge, so they don't get as much first-hand experience with (and empathy for) problem situations like my example.
Dont tell me that the so called dependency hell is the blame of package manager please.
I wouldn't say that. But I wouldn't say that dependency hell has been banished from the earth yet either. The fact is that there seems to be a need for a tool like Nix, so it just makes you think: why is this tool needed? What is causing the problem? What is the right way to solve the problem and how can we encourage and support a solution? Etc. -Archie -- Archie L. Cobbs -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-buildservice+help@opensuse.org