Fast releases demand binary updates.. (Was: Release schedule for 2006)

Jo Rhett jrhett at svcolo.com
Thu Dec 22 12:57:38 PST 2005


On Sat, Dec 17, 2005 at 06:55:03PM -0500, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> YMMV.  I burned a 6.0 release from the ISO image, and did a binary upgrade on an
> IBM ThinkPad (T.34? maybe), which worked perfectly.  All of the 5.x binaries,
> including X11, KDE, printing, Mozilla, etc worked just fine.

There are no ISO for patch releases.  And taking systems offline for a .1
update gets annoying fast.  Dealing with all the file comparisons which are
exactly the same except for the CVS tag takes hours for no good reason.
Multiple many hours by hundreds of systems, and you could easily have a
full time person just doing FreeBSD upgrades.

> Upgrading the ports from there was somewhat annoying

I don't care about ports, just the base OS.  Ports we've built the
infrastructure to handle properly, and very few ports are installed on
production systems.

> Now, if you want to talk about upgrading to intermediate patch releases, you've
> got a valid point there.  :-)
 
That is exactly the point.  Both .01 and .1 releases are annoying.

-- 
Jo Rhett
senior geek
SVcolo : Silicon Valley Colocation


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