Re: concurrent installation of different pkg versions
Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> writes:
> On Sat, 26 Apr 2014, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> And simultaneous installation of multiple versions of packages is
>> simply a requirement for many research computing scenarios, usually
>> because there's a lot of bespoke scientific code that accomplishes some
>> specific goal but was not written to the standards one would expect
>> from professional programmers, and therefore doesn't easily work with
>> newer versions of libraries.
> The right way to handle this for research computing scenarios is to
> deploy virtual machines with specific versions.... otherwise you're
> constantly battling with trying to make sure that you're actually using
> the version that you think you're using.
Yeah, usually what happens in practice is that a complex set of
environment variables and shell scripts are used to let people set up
their local environment to pick up a particular version of a package, but
the amount of combinatoric complexity that involves is rather high.
Containers would be a better environment, but you have to make them very,
very simple to set up.
> The quality of almost every single piece of scientific code I've ever
> worked with is so appalling that I'm always amazed when any of it
> produces any useful results, ever. And lets not even talk about whether
> the results it produces are accurate or reproducible...
Well, yes. It's a ton of code written by people who aren't really
programmers and who have lots of other things they care more about than
becoming better programmers.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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