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0 pointsdrdaeman14y ago0 comments

> Adding repositories? Already too late. Touching the command line?

Nope. As simple as clicking a link with special URL scheme, like `apt+hXXp://archive.canonical.com?package=acroread?dist=feisty?section=commercial`

> This is all compounded by the fact that there is no app bundle.

I'm all for the bundles (which single-app repositories, actually, are!), but I want them to be non-monolithic (i.e. contain multiple separate packages).

I don't care about disk space — if I'm that constrainted with disk space that's probably another story that'll probably never happen to most ordinary users, having terabytes of storage. But I certainly care about bugs, and if libXYZ 1.2 has a critical one, I want my system to be free of that version ASAP.

And I don't care that you've never tested your awesome app with 1.3 — it's better to be possibly unstable than certainly unstable or, far worse, vulnerable.

0 comments

Aqueous14y ago

What makes package maintainers uniquely qualified to patch dependencies and upgrade them? Either we say Canonical or Red Hat hires the best possible people to watch over their package repositories or we say that a qualified application developer could do just as well. Either way we end up having to trust somebody.

Both package maintainers and developers have an interest make sure their programs don't introduce vulnerabilities into the system. Therefore if there's a serious problem with one of their dependencies vulnerability patching will happen either way.

The distribution maintainers should be in charge of maintaining a core set of low-level dependencies that are needed by many applications. Beyond that they should leave the dependency management to the application developers. Seriously. That would free up so many millions of man-hours of work for say, Canonical, that they could actually make the core system usable to the average user.

dubya14y ago

"And I don't care that you've never tested your awesome app with 1.3 — it's better to be possibly unstable than certainly unstable or, far worse, vulnerable." Not all library bugs affect all programs though. If you change a library and break things, then the user usually has to wait for the maintainers to fix it, even if the programs would not have exposed the vulnerability. I am thinking of something like a program that uses libPNG to load included images that might break because libPNG has been changed because malicious images could cause a buffer overflow.

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