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#operationsandmaintenance — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #operationsandmaintenance, aggregated by home.social.

  1. @rysiek There's a flavour of argument over packaging systems and formats which runs:

    • X package format is difficult for software developers to use.
    • Y package format is easy for software developers to use.
    • Therefore Y package format is better than X.

    What's not realised is that the fundamental value and benefit to package management is to systems administrators / owners / users, and integrated distributions of packages. And that the major costs of operation and maintenance are not installation, but *operations and maintenance.

    "Easy for sofware developers" typically translates to "encourages sloppy and difficult-to-maintain processes and practices". Not only this, but by lowering up-front costs at the expense of long-term costs, the practice further encourages poor practices (from an O&M perspective), and puts well-behaved software at a disadvantage.

    See the Debian Project's explicit focus on user benefit, a long-term value benefit.

    This is a Jevons Paradox / Gresham's Law crowding out of well-behaved software and a race-to-the-bottom of poor long-term O&M behaviour.

    #Linux #PackageManagement #OperationsAndMaintenance #JevonsParadox #GreshamsLaw #Flatpak #snap