Ubuntu installers?

[Liam Proven]

On Mon, 9 Jan 2023 at 14:57, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
>
> if by now you and others haven't understood that this "severe
> improvement" of FAKE choice is EXACTLY the problem I and others are
> complaining about, I really wonder how the discussion could ever get
> anywhere.

What you and Owen are complaining about is a symptom. Oliver is trying
to design a tool to combat the disease.

I have tried to explain, several times, what the disease is and the
approaches to cures.

You are not listening because you are obsessing over the symptom.

It is not about packaging systems or tools. That is a symptom.

The problem is:  Linux is very complicated, because lots of different
teams design and build different bits of it. That makes it fragile.

The treatment is: make it less fragile.

Databases  are fragile. Databases are important. We need them. So a
genius called Ivor Codd invented some rules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID

ACID stands for: atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability.

What distro vendors are trying to do is make it possible to apply ACID
to Linux distros.

How to make it less fragile.

This means 2 big changes:

[1] Make the medium holding the installed OS much tougher
[2] Add multi-level "undo" to packaging operations.

Answers to #1 include make the partition read-only, which is called an
immutable OS.
Answers to #2 mean packaging tools that are isolated, don't touch the
OS, can be versioned, so a program can say "version 4.26 didn't work,
and version 4.24 didn't work, so I will go back to version 4.22."

With a read-only filesystem, apt and dnf and zypper don't work any
more. Doesn't matter: they violate A, C, & I anyway. And we need D and
we need A, C and I to get to D.

The goal is an OS that is effectively a sealed unit, like an Android ROM.

And yet, the user can install apps, and apps can't conflict, and apps
can be added and removed without affecting other apps, and they can go
back 2 versions, or 22 versions, which is impossible with Apt or Dnf.

With conventional Linux packaging tools, there is no "undo" function.

Example: I had Firefox 93. I installed 103. It didn't work.

apt remove firefox

It doesn't work. It doesn't go back. Now you have no Firefox  at all.
That is not an undo function.

So, you can't reinstall the old one as you can no longer download it.

You are obsessing over there being too many tools and not knowing how
to choose and you are missing the bigger picture, which is making
Linux as tough as Android, so if the battery goes out in the middle of
a software upgrade to 15 apps, when you plug it back in, it still
works, and you can still use it, and every app, even the ones that
were half way through updating. And you can continue the update, or do
it later, and still use it in the interim.

It is not about packaging tools, so *please* stop complaining about
packaging tools.

It is about getting from London to Dusseldorf via 3 trains, 6
motorways, a tunnel and an aeroplane, and you keep complaining that
the taxi to the station is the wrong colour.

-- 
Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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