[isabelle-dev] Repository Trouble

[Makarius]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2012, Jasmin Christian Blanchette wrote:

> Am 20.12.2012 um 21:30 schrieb Alexander Krauss:
>
>> On 12/20/2012 12:20 AM, Alexander Krauss wrote:
>>
>>> (2) The local sysadmins are working on replacement of the Mercurial 
>>> 2.4 from SuSE 12.2, which is potentially the cause problems here.
>>
>> Replacement with what? Going to an older version is no solution in the 
>> long run.
>
> [*] In fact, I've been successfully applying the policy of skipping many 
> versions of most of the software I use. This exposes me over time to 
> fewer bugs, and the bugs I'm exposed to I get to know better and work 
> around.

The latter tendency is indeed a very good one to retain sanity in 
production use of anything.  Staying up-to-date on the leading edge might 
be fun in its own right, but works against actual work getting done, where 
tools are just tools and not an end in itself.

BTW, SuSE 12.2 was mentioned on this thread several times, but the local 
admins have recently included an alternative RPM repository with sliding 
updates to "latest" versions.  It is unclear if this bites us here, but it 
is just another tendency towards more cunfusion of versions of everything.
(Like Gentoo does by default, as it seems.)


For the Isabelle distribution I always struggle to get just the right 
selection of "stable" versions of all these add-on components that we ship 
now, and the "latest" things just have the latest problems that are not 
solved yet.


 	Makarius