Re: Enterprise and Debian Pure Blends
On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 04:32:37PM +0200, Jesús M. Navarro wrote:
> Hi:
>
> On Thursday 02 September 2010 20:38:08 CJ Fearnley wrote:
> [...]
> > I think we need more than "standards, best practices, abstractions and
> > modularity". I don't think it is a pessimistic 20 year maturity process
> > before "the promised land" will be reached. I think as an industry
> > we are not yet even aware of the right design issues for integration
> > (at least I haven't yet found a forum where the issue is addressed at
> > the scale and scope that is necessary).
>
> I don't think so. I in fact think the opposite: the industry as a whole is
> quite aware about requisites, both technical and social, for integration (and
> security and promotion):
I see I skipped a few steps in my thinking. I agree that industry knows
how to do integration. But I think the current model for integration
and upgrades is overly labor intensive and difficult. I think we can
and should have smooth automated integration and upgrades. Although I
don't quite like Biomimicry (sometimes human engineering can improve upon
Nature: witness microelectronics), biology and ecology often demonstrate
much smoother transitions than we see in enterprise environments: growth
in creatures great and small is automatic and smooth: most creatures
are not even aware that they are growing it is so smooth. Even the
caterpillar->butterfly transition is smoother than many enterprise
upgrades: have you ever needed to rewrite code after an upgrade to fix
an issue missed in testing.
So I meant that industry is not yet aware of how to design automated
smooth upgrades and so they have adopted the current baroque practice
which works but is terribly labor intensive and frequently entails delays
when testing uncovers major issues.
My vision is that like Nature, software should be eternally regenerative.
Industry does not seem to me to even be aware of the value of eternal
regenerative software (I've never seen it specified in an RFP ;).
I think eternal regenerativity is an emergent property of Debian policy.
I think Debian, quite by accident, is leading the industry to smooth
automated integration and upgrades and that Industry is mostly unaware
of what Debian has so far accomplished (of course, even Debian upgrades
are too labor intensive and frequently break things: so we have a lot
of work left to do).
--
We are on a spaceship; a beautiful one. It took billions of years to develop.
We're not going to get another. Now, how do we make this spaceship work?
-- Buckminster Fuller
CJ Fearnley | Explorer in Universe
cjf@CJFearnley.com | "Dare to be Naive" -- Bucky Fuller
http://www.CJFearnley.com | http://blog.remoteresponder.net/
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