Re: [gentoo-dev] minimalistic emerge

On 8/8/14, 6:27 PM, Igor wrote:
>> Is there any warranty that updated with -uDN system will remain
>> full functional for 1 year? I have 100% warranty that not updated
>> system is going to remain functional for 5 or 6 years. I have some with
>> 7 years uptime.

I'd say there is no "warranty". However, a staging environment can help
detecting issues earlier, before deploying them to production and
allowing you to come up with a way to address them.

I certainly wouldn't recommend just running an update on a running
production server without testing it first.

>> I'm in a trap - if I update daily - the systems are offline, I'm not able
>> to maintain systems after updates - requires too much resources. If you have
>> 1 gentoo it might take a few days, imagine you have 100 or 1000 systems and
>> they do not share the same hardware or the same boot locations,
>> they all can be managed by 2 people if not updated and you need about 100
>> people if you update.

Consider automating the processes - as you pointed out, the way
described above doesn't scale.

Possibly relevant article would be
<http://www.site-reliability-engineering.info/2014/04/what-is-site-reliability-engineering.html>

>> The number of bugs is the same. It's more difficult to hack into 1996 system
>> than in 2012.

Do you have any evidence to back that claim? There are tons of known
vulnerabilities in '96-era software, and automated exploits for them.

By the way, I can see a point in your thread. Our updates and package
manager could be improved. They have improved greatly in the last few
years. I think I can safely say we welcome further contributions of
patches, packaging and testing effort, especially helping automate many
of these tasks.

Paweł