Re: Vulnerabilities rated medium or low risk may not be fixed by Debian security team, is that correct?

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016, at 20:32, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 12:51:06PM -0200, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
> wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 18, 2016, at 18:21, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > > Right.  Debian kernel updates can only be applied with a reboot.  If
> > > we publish a kernel update, its mere availability may put some of our
> > > users out of compliance with their policies, which is why we batch
> > > these updates.
> > 
> > Is this correct?  Really?
> 
> Well, in certain environments I would not be surprised by a security
> policy
> that boils down to: "If a security patch from [authorized source] becomes
> available, it must be applied to all applicable systems within [short
> time]."

I was asking about the kernel team's policy.

I could care less for the policies of "certain environments", they are
NOT likely to be a problem: any remotely sane site with a policy that
enforces a deadline to install security updates (including reboots) will
also have policies on scheduling the required maintenance window for
such updates, *including* what to do when the maintenance window can't
be scheduled to avoid SLA violations.  And that's for environments where
you can't just do staggered updates, taking a set of nodes offline to
update and regression-test, and bring them back to production (or
rollback/abort the update should a regression be detected) without much
(if any) impact to services.

-- 
  Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>