On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 07:59:55PM -0800, Christopher Barker wrote:
I used to do that — for years. But it really did cause problems.
The trick is that you have, say, your 57 apps all working. Then you need to update a package for one. As soon as you update, you have to go test your 57 apps, and if one of them is broken, you have to figure out how to deal with it.
Now you have 52 apps running in the main environment, and 5 running in their own... and you are on your way to an even harder to manage system.
I don't get it. How is it "even harder" to manage? The five apps you have isolated are, well, isolated. And for the rest, you've gone down from 57 apps to 52, so there's less complexity and fewer dependencies, so it should be easier, not harder, to manage. Now there is clearly one sense that it is harder to manage: updates. If one of the common dependencies needs updating, then you have to update it six times: once each for the five isolated apps, and once for the non-isolated apps. So that makes it harder to manage; but I guess that's not what you meant. So if you extrapolate to the point that all 57 apps are isolated, what you save in potential-or-actual conflicts you lose in updatings. Whether that makes it worthwhile, I think, depends on how often you expect to be updating versus how often you expect to be introducing new conflicts. Clearly there are cases where you have, say, a rapidly changing app with lots of dependencies that are consistently conflicting with other apps; or you have a legacy app that needs a frozen, stable environment (possibly even including the OS!). In both of these extreme cases isolating the app makes great sense. But I'm not convinced that isolation makes sense every time I start to write a 300 line script, let alone a 30 line one. I guess that's what annoys me about verts -- it isn't that I don't see their usefulness. But it seems to me, rightly or wrongly, that a power feature which is mostly of benefit to quite big and/or complex development tasks is being pushed as the One True Way that everyone must use, always. -- Steve