Upgrading – a permanent and universal state
You’ve just finished installing the latest version of your favourite tool, application, amusement or whatever and in the blink of an eye there’s a patch, update, upgrade or something completely new to replace it, and your colleagues are berating you for having something so old and out of date. By the time I come back to this note, all the things I have installed will be ancient. Netbeans 6.9 was released recently, but I’m still using 6.8. My installation of Padre has to updated via CPAN every other day. Tomcat 7 was released two days ago, while I’m still getting used to 6.0.26! One of my Centos installations was automatically upgraded to a new Kernel, and needless to say that the only things that broke were the most important things, especially VMware. (They’re fixed now, but only after a lot of hacking.) The Adobe Reader seems to update every week, and still demands that I reboot!
I have many systems to care for, and so an increasingly significant portion of my time is being spent on doing upgrades. OS patches, Anti-virus updates and endless security patches. I get the impression that all my systems are being held together by sticking plaster.
It would not surprise me if some enterprising people come up with a comprehensive all-in-one keep-up-to-date solution. It just sits in the background and checks for all of the relevant updates, and performs all them silently, rolling back only if necessary. No more balloons popping up saying “A new version of X has been released”, no more endless clicking of “Next”, no more worrying about what might break next.
One problem with this is the need to ensure that the user has read and agreed to the Ts&Cs of each upgrade. I can see it now: I turn on my machine and I am presented with a lot of legal gobbledegook and boxes for me to tick. Once past the minefield I can just get on with working, and I imagine it could be quite fun dealing with applications that quietly morph from day to day as they get their silent upgrades.
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