[Nottingham] Gentoo portage tips

[Robert Davies]

On Monday 01 Sep 2003 10:59, David Ginger wrote:
> "While you might have been erroneously taught that automation is a good
> thing because it removes human error, this is not the case. Unix Systems
> are written in C, with a philosophy of 'the programmer knows best'. That
> philosophy is reflected throughout almost the entire system."
>
> IMHO trying to improve the current state of affairs by creating better
> package systems and update software is a noble effort.

Human's are in control, they issue advisories and prepare and test package 
updates, the administrator decides when (or if) an update occurs.  Many 
update facilities allow you to be selective as well, should you wish.

The problem seems a design error in portage; security and critical bug fixes 
aren't treated any differently from updates which add new features, which are 
(reasonably) only installed if you ask for them.

All I can say to that quote is, I bet the programmer's that wrote that didn't 
put the end user in control of the internal details of their software.  Just 
as the POSIX interface strives for a clean seperation of user-space and 
processes.  What exactly were these programmer's doing, if not automating?  
Laziness is a programming virtue, there's an essential tradition of punting 
problems, to already developed, debugged and tested software; hence lex & 
yacc, shell scripts & filter's, libc qsort, hsearch, stdio etc etc.

That quote refers to nanying, old style OS's would have services which tried 
to interact with the user (perhaps by JCL), and would restrict choices, 
things like file types, where it was common for it to be impossible to feed 
output of a program into Fortran compiler say.

Rob