Re: when does one change from testing to stable in sources.list
Hi, David:
On Monday 13 December 2010 02:54:05 David Jardine wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 12:31:03AM +0100, Jesús M. Navarro wrote:
> > Hi, Tom:
> >
> > On Friday 10 December 2010 12:04:33 Tom Furie wrote:
[...]
> > > Why? What's the difference between having stable in the source list and
> > > automatically upgrading when the new stable is released - all upgrade
> > > issues *should* be worked out by then
> >
> > Except those that depend on you yourself.
> >
> > Some examples:
> > * Having something more urgent to do right now.
> > * Being unable to take your servers off-line.
> > * Having internal packages that need to be tested.
> > * Having 1000 servers to take care of, so it will take a while to upgrade
> > them all.
>
> If you stayed with "testing" you would run a slight risk of things going
> wrong.
In my experience, the risk is not "slight" but unbeareable for production
environments. Obviously, your mileage may vary.
> In return you would have incremental upgrades rather than the big
> bangs of release changes.
Which it's by itself a big reason to stay with Stable (at least on my book): I
can program a window in which things can break, specially when I have a whole
year to produce it but I can't take the risk of things breaking at unexpected
times and, please, note that a single package breaking due to a version
upgrade is just one of the situations:
* a new package changes the way it's configured
* a package contains an unseen bug by itself (this and the previous are the
obvious ones)
* a package's new functionality conflicts with another installed package,
either from Debian repos or not.
* a package's new functionality conflicts with a subsystem in another, remote
system.
All of these is what makes me already testing "Testing" environments on some
virtual machines but only upgrading production ones not only once Squeeze
becomes the new Stable, but some time after that, when the waters calm down a
bit, I had the time to study the release notes, testing some more about the
interaction problems between systems in order to produce an upgrade calendar
and find the proper time-windows to do it... without being "surprised" the
very day Squeeze becomes Stable nor risking losing some security updates in
the meanwhile.
Cheers.
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