[PLUG] For The SysAdmin Gurus

Wil Cooley wcooley at nakedape.cc
Wed Aug 16 01:55:08 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-08-15 at 16:31 -0700, Rich Shepard wrote:

>    I don't use Slackware for control, but for stability 'way back from the
> bleeding edge.

Then why are you installing Firefox?  Netscape 4.78 was rock-solid.
(Okay, it wasn't.)

If Slackware isn't providing you with Firefox updates, then how stable
can it be?  Firefox is one of your core tools--and a common one at that.
It's like saying a particular car is rock-solid but you have to supply
your own transmission.

>    I've not been a twiddler and tweaker, but a learner. When I learned enough
> to know how to do the things I wanted, I simplified my network and settled
> back to use the system as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Other
> than security upgrades to the system, and certain security or bug fixes to
> the applications I use daily, I don't futz with the system until I get a new
> distribution set in the mail. It takes me perhaps an hour to upgrade all
> three hosts here, and I'm done with system administration other than
> checking the log summaries mailed to me each morning and changing the backup
> tapes on Friday and Monday.

That's now how it looks on this side of the mailing list.  Let's see, in
the past few weeks you've:
 o Had a /usr/lib/ with broken symlinks to NSPR libraries
 o Had a Firefox that wouldn't print certain pages
 o Had a broken pkg-config for glib (probably caused by an incomplete 
   attempt at manual installation w/gtk+)
 o Had jpilot crashing with an invalid pointer to free()
 o Attempted to rebuild and install gtk+, atk, pango, cairo, which you 
   then had to (manually) uninstall
 o Had jpilot not displaying the calendar correctly
 o Which seems to have been caused by a prior attempt to manually 
   build  and install gtk+
 o Had GPG break mysteriously by installing the package from some 
   other site on the net
 
That's a lot of problems for a stable system that you don't twiddle or
tweak.

You do realize that second-level-version upgrades to libraries like
glib, gtk+, atk, pango, etc. are the kind of things that only get
upgraded on major releases, even on a bleeding-edge distro like Fedora,
because everything that links to them should be relinked.

>    I don't know why you think I do things manually. The Slackware package
> tools (installpkg, upgradepkg, removepkg) make distribution and application
> upgrades much less of a hassle than I had with Red Hat.

Wrappers around 'tar'.  The reason you had hassles with Red Hat was
because it was enforcing dependency tracking, which exists to prevent
exactly the kind of problems you're having now.  You can't list the
files a particular package owns, find the dependencies of a package,
find what packages depend on a package, verify that all the files are
installed and are correct checksums, etc.

>    Well, the problem also occurs with packages created specifically for
> Slackware. The same package won't properly print on the one box, but will on
> another. What that has to do with the distribution I don't know.

Then they're badly packaged or badly built?  As I said before, a core
application like Firefox should be supported out of the box in a desktop
distro.

>    I know full well that you've a ton of experience. When three systems are
> running the same distribution and the same versions of everything, but one
> has a problem with one application that is not a problem on the other hosts,
> I fail to see how it's the result of my choice of a linux distribution.
> However, ...

There's no way to know what's different between these supposedly
identical systems because you don't have package management.  Well,
that's not /entirely/ true--you can do it the brute-force method--use
'find' to create a list of every file on the system,
pruning /home, /var, maybe others, and then diff them.

Wil
-- 
Wil Cooley <wcooley at nakedape.cc>
Naked Ape Consulting, Ltd. <http://nakedape.cc>
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