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> I think encouraging a culture of distributing software in such a fashion is an incredibly bad idea

It isn't obvious to me how that is dramatically different from traditional package managers as far as the update process goes. Upgrading decencies seems like a generally active and involved process as far as most package managers I've seen go.

pip/apt/npm/go-get/glide/yum/nixos etc all require you to actively discover and upgrade your dependencies and I've never been prompted to upgrade a package from any of the programs (a few do ask if you actively engage special subcommands on CLI e.g apt list --upgrade). Unattended-upgrades might be close but you can really only enable that on security releases and most package managers don't have the resources to setup special distros (and fewer backport security fixes).

So is the pain really just not having a quick upgrade cli and is that dramatically different from going to a github page and getting the new URL for a new binary? Would something as simple as writing a script to list and download versions of binaries from github releases make this a non issue?

discuss

sambe|8 years ago

They don't require you to discover - they all have a clear and easy option to go and find updates automatically. Most of the system-level ones also have various schedulers & notifiers (both CLI and GUI) which are normally on by default for common distributions.

timlyo|8 years ago

Nixos can automatically upgrade.

https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/#idm140737316798064

jhasse|8 years ago

Fedora Workstation asks you to automatically install updates on shutdown/reboot.

Also: an update prompt which you get on Ubuntu, is still better than nothing.

rekado|8 years ago

Debian has watch files to discover updates.

Guix has updater programmes for various kinds of origins to discover updates.