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Re: RFC: implementation of package pools



On Fri, 20 Oct 2000, Eray Ozkural wrote:

> > We already have such tools, but they cannot be 100% effective no matter
> > how perfect you make them.

> I don't understand this. :) That's what tools are good for, being
> 100% effective. We're not talking about group psychology here! It's

If you don't understand this you need to spend some time researching
computer reliability, and topics related to disaster recovery, fault
tolerance, etc.

> a computing matter that can be specified and solved 100%. binutils
> are examples to some very good tools. But perhaps I'm underestimating

You are delusional if you are somehow purporting binutils as 'very good
tools' they solve a *very* hard problem imperfectly at best. But that's
another topic.

> > Complicating things like this only increases the chance an error will be
> > made during some king of critical intervention operation.

> But you don't manually intervene ld.so.cache, or do you? 

Again, that is a crazy example. ld.so.cache is not strictly required for
the system to operate in a recovery situation and it can be completely
reconstructed with a single program (so yes, you certainyl can intervene: 
rm /etc/ld.so.cache). None of these are true for the archive. 
 
> > Yet dpkg still exists, and the files are indeed stored in a text
> > format. Guess why?
> 
> Yea, but if I can write a robust re-implementation of dpkg that's
> at least as reliable as the text-based one, and which has enough
> utilities that make it as convenient as editing text files with

Again, you appear to have no understanding at all on how software systems
fail. If you were to make all binary tools, and make them so they could
compensate for all possible failure modes on the binary database you would
have a system that is a magnitude more complicated than it really needs to
be. Human intervention is an acceptable recovery procedure for /var/lib/dpkg.

> Okay, where is the ITP for it? I don't see an ITP for these,
> please tell the person who's planning to do this issue
> a formal ITP for dinstall and dinstall-utils or whatever

The author(s) will package them and upload them. Anyone uploading code
from their CVS trees would be doing a serious breach of protocol.

Jason





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