Re: [gentoo-server] Stable portage tree

[Alex Efros]

Hi!

On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 11:00:21AM +0100, Ian P. Christian wrote:
> Updating every 6/12 months is fine in principle, but it means going
> though 10's of machines updating config files and resolving conflics.
> This is a painful task, it's fine for 1 machine, it's fine for 5... but
> you have any real number of servers to maintain and it ends up taking
> hours or days to upgrade your servers.

Yeah, your right. But there simple solution for this: update your servers
every 3-4 days, and you will be surprised how ease and quick this task become.
You'll need from a couple of seconds to 2-3 minutes in average for such update!
Usually a few not important for you applications will be updated, which
can't broke anything on your server, and which require few seconds to
update their config files. Sometimes one of applications critical for your
server become updated, and this require more attention, but it's much
better to update ONE such important application instead of updating ALL of
such important applications every 6-12 month. And this way you always can
ease fallback to previous version of this application if something goes
wrong on your server, add broken (for you) version to
/etc/portage/package.mask, report bug and wait for next update.

I've tried all these ways of updating my servers in last 2 years:
update every few days, update only security issues, update every 6-12 months
and found first way much more ease, effective and manageable than others.
With two other ways I also wanna 'stable portage tree', with first way I
don't need it - ARCH=x86 IS A 'stable portage tree' for me now. :)

-- 
			WBR, Alex.
-- 
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