The perils of package managers

I typically use Fedora or CentOS linux, and sometimes Ubuntu.  In all honesty, I don't really care so long as I can get to a stable running system.  And because I don't believe that running a simple server should require me to ingest the life's work of Linus Torvalds et al, I use a package manager.  There's something nice about 'yum install php mysql httpd'.

However, the downside to this is that when things go wrong, the first thing you see is something like:

service mysqld start
Timeout error occurred trying to start MySQL Daemon.
Starting MySQL:                                   [FAILED]

This time, I was left hunting around for a language binary file that had the right number of messages in it, which ultimately meant finding a binary distro on the MySQL site and replacing the affected file.

I'd like to say this was an isolated incident, but I frequently have issues of this type.  There doesn't seem to be enough testing, given the absolutely massive code base that these distributions of Linux are trying to maintain.  If people need to take their lives in their hands when they type 'yum update' then I'd not be surprised to find the majority of people too scared to apply security fixes.

This seems to me to be a real issue for Linux.  There needs to be increased coordination and standardisation to agree on directory structures, package formats and managers.  Otherwise, Linux is never going to make it beyond the level of market acceptance it has currently.  Software bloat might even entice users away from Linux if M$ get their act together and provide a viable alternative for cheap web hosting.

 


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