Re: How to reference external program used in shell-scripts?

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hartmut Goebel <address@hidden> writes:

> Am 03.09.19 um 15:01 schrieb Ludovic Courtès:
>> The whole idea of functional software deployment is that it’s stateless:
>> you can tell that /gnu/store/…-ansible-1.2.3 will always behave the
>> same, no matter what other programs are available on your machine.
>>
>> Introducing “dynamic binding” (e.g., looking up programs in $PATH) would
>> allow for faster security updates in the example you gave, but that
>> would be at the expense of that core property I described above.  It
>> would be a regression.
>>
>> I think what we need in this case is (1) fast security updates, which is
>> what grafts help us achieve, and (2) documentation that clarifies what
>> the deployment model is, such that Mary would know that ‘ansible’ also
>> needs to be upgraded in the example above.
>
> I understand this.
>
> Anyway: IMHO missing "dynamic binding" is one of the major drawbacks of
> functional deployment, as it requires updating (and esp. downloading)
> much more packages compared to a rpm/deb based system.

At the same time static binding is also one of the major advantages as
deployments are stateless and thus much more predictable, reliable, and
inspectable.

--
Ricardo