[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] maemo weekly news anyone?

[From: Rainer Dorsch]

Am Sonntag, 12. November 2006 21:54 schrieb Larry Battraw:
> From the operation system maintainer's perspective they're now
> looking at the issue of a doing an in-place upgrade as opposed to a
> fresh install.  This is hard to do right and there are always issues,
> regardless of whether you're running Windows or Linux.  What if a
> installed application wants a particular version of a library and
> we're installing a new (incompatible) version for the OS?  What about
> configuration files with user-modified information in them?  Libraries
> or system applications that have changed names (breaking dependency
> checks)?  The biggest problem is that the OS install must cope with
> whatever state the device is in.  It must break whatever incompatible
> applications are present when it does the install to allow it to
> function after the upgrade and resolve any dependency checks, all
> without user input since we can't assume any level of technical
> competence on the part of the user.

Larry,

isn't that the problem which Debian and Ubuntu solved already. Debian testing 
user are doing that almost every day/week/month. I would expect that the 
Debian/Ubuntu problem is much harder, because, they support many more apps 
and a huge variety of hardware?

At least the Ubuntu upgrade does not need technical competence. Even if you 
would need some limited technical competence, wouldn't that be worth, because 
that additional benefit would be valued by people with technical competence. 
And these are important for the ecosystem (?).

A good start would be to have a clean Debian-like upgrade path, if no third 
party tools are installed...

Thanks,
Rainer



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Rainer Dorsch
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