Re:Ask HN: What is the best Linux distro for a development l...
by kasabali on Sunday January 08, 2017 @06:47AM
(#13349327)
OK, now I understand what you mean by reliability and I appreciate that. Thanks for explaining it.
I'm just not comfortable you claiming it is more reliable than apt because then some people will think it is a package manager with minimal amount of importance was attached to its design so that it won't leave the users system in an inconsistent state even in most easily correctable scenarios when that's actually not the case.
Reliability has many dimensions.
If I can't trust that the package manager handles all the issues you can encounter when managing packages, I cannot trust any component which interacts with the package manager to be reliable either.
dnf does a lot of right things(tm) which apt doesn't, which means I can trust that scripts I write to work with the package manager will work reliably.
Apt outsources approximately 2 out of 3 failure-modes to its users meaning every automated attempt to interact with it, is bound to fail on stupid shit it shouldn't.
And then you can't rely on apt. Apt is not reliable.
To me it seems like a misinformed version of "KISS"/"YAGNI", because you do need a package manager to handle and abstract all those things. That's what it's for.