[Info-vax] Variable declarations, was: Re: improving EDT

[Scott Dorsey]

John Reagan  <xyzzy1959 at gmail.com> wrote:
>True!  For all the people who chuckle at Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday", my ho=
>me Ubuntu system seems to have an update about once a week.  Some of them a=
>re rolling out new functionality which isn't "unstable" but as Scott says, =
>you no longer can know for sure exactly what features the system supports. =
> Some of them are security updates.  From a gut feel, there are just as man=
>y security issues being fixed on Ubuntu as on my Windows boxes.

Not really.  Most of the changes on Ubuntu are feature changes, not security
changes.  From some perspectives that's even worse... this week there is a
patch to put the icon on the lefthand side of the screen... next week there is
a patch to put the icon on the righthand side of the screen... the week after
there will be a patch to put it back on the lefthand side of the screen.  There
is a tremendous amount of that sort of "change for change's sake" that goes on
with Ubuntu, much more so than with the more straightforward linux
distributions.

Not long ago Ubuntu was using SysV startup, then it was using Upstart, now
it's using systemd.  But for a while you could have processes that started
up with any of those three, so if you wanted to restart a process you had to
figure out what had started it in the first place.  This is the consequence
of lack of fundamental design combined with an attempt to make the system the
best for every possible application at the same time.

There have actually been very few real security issues with Ubuntu, but still
there have been vast oceans of patches and updates.  
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."