Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Andraž 'ruskie' Levstik" <ruskie AT mages.ath.cx>]

On 10:42:30 2007-01-07 seth AT swoolley.homeip.net wrote:
> > Which we provide them with.... What we don't support is constantly
> > installing a newer version of our system... 
> 
> You probably mean that we don't support iso-based upgrades.  We support 
> in-situ upgrades the same as an iso-based binary distro would, but it's 
> more like a debian update than an iso-based update.
> 
> We don't support "upgrade installs" where the iso/installer does the 
> work because the package manager is strong enough to do it (unlike rpm).
> 
> We could always make cauldron handle upgrades, but it's almost 
> pointless since we already have a better system.
> 
Acctually I was refering to the people that install a FRESH system every
time a NEW stable release comes out with other distros. I know of people
that install for example slackware 9.0 then when 9.1 comes out they backup
their old config and do a FRESH install completly obliterating the old one.

Personaly I think updating from ISO might be usefull in a limited scope.
For example for a box that is not connected to the internet due to whatever
reasons etc. But this can be done using our current system anyway.

> > Who said they need to upgrade? We provide a mechanism to ONLY update
> > for security fixes so there really isn't much to this. If they wish
> > it so they can also update the rest but it can be limited to security
> > only.
> 
> This isn't really supported.  Yes, it is supported for 
> intra-stable-cycles, but outside of a stable cycle, we only support 
> security updates working on the current stable grimoire.
> 
> When a new stable grmimoire comes out all new security updates will be 
> in context with the new stable, when it's tested anyways.  People are 
> free to continue managing a system that has really old basesystem,
> etc., but we can't claim it's tested when, for example, they need to
> update sendmail and all the deps are different from how the sendmail
> patch or update was tested.
> 
True. But I think for security fixes we first need to start checking what
updates acctually qualfy as security fixes I'm guessing there's a big pile
of them that weren't marked as such simply because nobody noticed them and
were updated during the course of a normal update.

> > The only thing here I think is that we should still provide an
> > unversioned symlink to the latest stable tarball that way it's
> > possible to keep up to date with stable releases without needing to
> > switch them constantly.
> 
> We've always done this.  I don't expect this to change.
> 
Wasn't aware of this.

--
Andraž "ruskie" Levstik
Source Mage GNU/Linux Games grimoire guru
Geek/Hacker/Tinker

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