Re: just shoot me

["Steve Lamb" <morpheus@teleute.ml.org>]

On Mon, 19 Oct 1998 16:15:45 -0700 (PDT), George Bonser wrote:

>I just wonder .... when a freeze is announced, a lot of people load up
>their systems from unstable to give it a good workout. You might consider
>this a wide but not ubiquitous beta. At this point, now that you have
>several more times more systems in sync with the unstable tree, would it
>make sense for someone ( other than the package maintainer ) to install
>the package and check it out before addig it to the archive? I mean, not
>an extensive feature bugcheck, just a basic integrity check to make sure
>that it does not crash a system when installed.

    I think this was hashed over on -devel a few months back when there was
another blow-up problem in a freeze.  A lot of things were tossed back and
forth and I don't quite remember what came out of it.  

>If status can be changed to frozen and packages can be added that will
>blow your system up, how are we going to get people to test after a freeze
>announcement when it reality there is no comfort level that you will not
>be loading something that is going to trash your system.

    But that can happen, even in "stable".  All it takes is a bug fix in
something that is security related which can get into the stable side of life
and it can break other packages.  Take a look at ncurses and sc, for example.
 Almost each time ncurses gets updated, sc breaks.

    Youse takes your chances.

>The problem on one of my remote servers was resolved easilly enough. I had
>to make an appointment, be escorted back into the computer room, then
>spend a half-hour repairing the system and taking care of a couple of
>other odds/ends.

    Personally, on production machines that you don't have access to easily
enough (for me that is walking into the next room) I'd not even think of
upgrading from a stable to a frozen.  I'd just ride the stables out.

-- 
         Steve C. Lamb         | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
         ICQ: 5107343          | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
-------------------------------+---------------------------------------------