Worse, if an app is updated whilst it's running, it can cause arbitrary crashes and data corruption.
I'm really glad Linux is finally moving beyond the curse of apt-get. I wrote a framework a long time ago for building distro-neutral binary installer/package hybrids and eventually walked away ... back then Ubuntu was brand new and Shuttleworth was even warm to the idea, but the old guard he had to deal with hated the idea. Other distributors were even worse. They had all bought into the idea that the way Linux managed software was awesome and superior to every other OS, even as new operating systems were designed and shipped that universally did not use it.
Hah, that brings back some memories! 2005?! Yes, it must have been around a decade ago now.
It was written in thousands of lines of bash because back then, I had used some random distro that didn't have Python installed out of the box so I became convinced that only bash would be compatible enough. No clue if that perception was actually right - Python would probably have worked well enough. The GUI was in C/GTK. Some of the binary compatibility tools were an unholy mix of bash, C and assembler :)
Not so much "the old guard he had to deal with hated the idea" and "bought into the idea that the way Linux managed software was awesome and superior", but...
closer to...
"changing a fundamental building block needs to solve a user problem" (and there are multiple kinds of users involved). :-)
I'm really glad Linux is finally moving beyond the curse of apt-get. I wrote a framework a long time ago for building distro-neutral binary installer/package hybrids and eventually walked away ... back then Ubuntu was brand new and Shuttleworth was even warm to the idea, but the old guard he had to deal with hated the idea. Other distributors were even worse. They had all bought into the idea that the way Linux managed software was awesome and superior to every other OS, even as new operating systems were designed and shipped that universally did not use it.