On 2021-06-01 10:00 a.m., Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 06:32:48PM -0400, Znoteer via talk wrote:
And, if your instance of yt-dl is out-of-date and poutube serves you some errors,
"youtube-dl -U"
will update your instance for you. Here's a brief description from
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#options
--- begin documentation quote --- -U or --update
Updates the youtube-dl program to its latest version. Make sure that you have sufficient permissions (run with sudo if needed). --- end documentation quote ---
Are you sure you don't want to hear the Reading Edge rap? :)
Well at least my version doesn't have a -U option, which is good, since I would expect Debian (Well DMO rather than Debian in this case) to have removed that kind of misfeature from a program.
Lennart, I'm fascinated by your characterization of a program's self updating as a misfeature. In youtube-dl's case, this is a necessary feature, due to the rapidly changing nature of it's targets. Video host deliberately don't supply any stable API to download videos from, and tools like youtube-dl are day-to-day arms race with the sites to keep them working. When I worked back at the VFX studio it was common practice to be downloading videos to add as reference material artists would use to understand what they were animating (so many dolphin videos...). But the versions of youtube-dl would regularly break if your on a long term stable like CentOS or an EoL Fedora (we had both). So granting a sudo policy to let the editors do an update of the application with -U when youtube broke the application was essential in our case. I understand that it creates a different channel of trust, outside the distros, but in the case of 'it breaks regularly with no upgrade path from the distro' vs 'managed by upstream developers which your trusting anyways', I see this as the exception that proves the rule. -- Scott Sullivan