New releases for bugfixes

[Konstantin Kharlamov]

I'm sad other emails sound kinda harsh and without detailed elaboration. Folks,
please, let's keep the discussion peaceful. Different people have different set
of knowledge, that's life. Angry comments would push people away from the
community.

On Thu, 2022-09-08 at 19:23 -0230, samuel ammonius wrote:
> > and you marry upstream binaries with the distribution update-manager how?
> 
> You don't need to. The app can just check the latest bugfix for that version
> on git
> and install it if it isn't installed. I don't understand why you stress the
> need for the
> package manager to have anything to do with the update if it's just a bug fix.

You see: when you have versioning of the same file managed by two or more
programs, you will inevitably get into conflicts. One program updated the file
to one version, then another program overwrote the file with something else. I
think it is clear that this will result in all kinds of problems. The obvious
one is that your bugfix-update may get overwritten by something else. And this
is exactly what you suggest. You suggest we have program update itself,
disregarding the package manager. That's not gonna end well.

Then there's another problem: tracking of the files. If your "autoupdater" put a
new file to the system, and later the user decides "I'm not using the app, let's
just remove it", the file would just be left there. Because only package manager
knows what files contains the program, but your autoupdater didn't communicate
that new file to the package manager. So, as the number of such apps grows
bigger, you would have junk all over the system.

On a related note, you as a user or developer often want to know where a file on
your syste came from. At my $WORK we bulid a system with some proprietary apps,
it's a very old project, and the building process for quite some time would just
put configs/binaries/stuff into the system, without consulting package manager.
While this didn't result in conflicts since the filenames were mostly unique,
however this did have a problem, where you often just don't know where a given
file came from. You can't run a package manager, point it to the file, and ask
it "do you know who owns this file?". We later migrated to creating packages
that hold all of that stuff, which greatly simplified things.