Current situation of amarok, and of latex tools

Onno Benschop onno at itmaze.com.au
Mon May 25 23:23:47 UTC 2009


On 25/05/09 21:01, Andrew Sayers wrote:
> Jan Claeys wrote:
>   
>> A lot of people run unstable during alpha & beta, but many do it in a VM
>> or on an old spare system.  That doesn't help find regressions that are
>> hardware-related, of course, and in general those systems might not see
>> the same sort of use that people's "main" computers see.
>>
>> And to be honest, I don't see how we can make more people use alpha
>> versions on their "I need this for work" system...
>>     
>
> Recycling my chroot idea from before, how about encouraging people to 
> install Alpha versions in a chroot?  You could use localfs to graft your 
> real /home in if you wanted.  A bit of grub trickery would even let you 
> boot right into the chroot, with the alpha kernel, when you had enough 
> free time to give it a go.
>
> 	- Andrew
>   

The challenge I see is that there appears to be a mind-set disconnect
between workstation and server users. A half competent server
administrator is expected to understand that there are going to be
unhappy users breaking down the front door if something happens to their
data, so there is a self-regulating conservatism within the upgrade
cycle - less upgrades means less heartache.

I don't see the same attitude within the desktop community. There seems
to be this notion - evidence to the contrary - that a desktop user will
protect their own data and backup before they upgrade. Not only that, a
glaring hole appears if you consider the example notion of a snap-shot
before an Evolution upgrade, so you can downgrade. "What happens to the
email that is sent and received between the snap-shot and the down-grade?"

As I've said earlier in this thread, I'm contemplating an all virtual
desktop. I'm also looking at abstracting data storage as much as
possible, that is, store documents in a virtual SAN, store email on an
IMAP server, store development code within xyz repository and use my
virtual desktop as client to my virtual server(s). This may well seem
overkill, but I've been bitten too many times by clients being upgraded
that I am beginning to suspect that the decrease in overall actual speed
will be well surpassed by the increase in data security.

We talk over and over again about application/data separation, but until
applications do that for real - we have a long way to go.

Data is important and I have to say that I see little evidence within
individual applications that it is taken seriously - almost like not
willing to accept that their little program is used by real people for
real purposes.

-- 
Onno Benschop

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