Re: When bug fixes are applied on stable ?
2014-06-11 1:48 GMT+02:00 Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>:
>> The only problem I found with this release system it that, for the
>> users like me that use Debian stable, it is not very motivating to
>> find bug fixes because they are never applied to my version.
>
> On the contrary for me. For me it is very important to test out
> Unstable and Testing so that when the next Stable release is made that
> it will not have bugs that affect me. I depend upon Stable. But that
> means I must test with Testing/Unstable so that bugs get fixed.
> Therefore I am more motivated to report bugs and to work through bugs.
>
Yes but, as a network administrator, I'am front of a problem with
debian Stable : the distribution is not very tested for entreprise
where we use complex tools (ldap, kerberos, nfs4, ...) and eccentric
configurations ( shared home, shared wine prefix, complex pam auth,
...). So In one year of production I was confronted to some critical
bugs difficult to fix. Here some examples :
-> pulseaudio won't start on cifs home, I needed to switch to nfs4
(http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/pulseaudio-discuss/2014-April/020351.html)
Bug reported upstream, corrected on git version.
-> gdm hang when disable_user_list = true
(https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=751140)
Bug reported and patch proposed. I hope It will corrected on next
point release since this is CVE-2013-7273.
->cups crash on unknown http state 0
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/512220)
Bug origin found but complex to fix.
-> Kernel oops on aufs mount of nfs or cifs filesystems.
Reported on many places. May be corrected on next kernel.
Moreover some bugs that appear insignificant for a normal Debian user
can become critical on entreprise. A simple example is LibreOffice.
Some of the tools of the suite does not get the defaut paper size from
libpaper or locale. So the print jobs are sended as US Letter instead
of A4 and the printers reject them. It's impossible for me to explain
to 1013 users how to change the page size. So they think that linux
works bad and I'am sad ...
Only this two tiny bugs (gdm login windows crash, print job rejected)
make that my users have not a very good experience of my network.
On my second mail I say that I will give a try to lighdm. It works
well but with it, it is impossible to swith users in gnome. So if
someone forget to close his session, the screen locks and it is
impossible to log on the station for the other users. And I don't want
to disable screen locks.
>> Moreover, in my network, I need to manage 120 Debian Wheezy clients.
>> So if I made the patch myself and create a new Debian package et is
>> difficult for me to deploy the patched version to the client.
>
> At 120 machines you have plenty enough to justify putting some work
> into automating the infrastructure. How are you applying security
> upgrades now? Are you logging into each of them individually and
> applying upgrades? Hopefully not. Let me point to a somewhat
> academic gathering of articles on the topic.
>
> http://www.infrastructures.org/
>
> I don't prefer pushing. I prefer that the systems pull updates. I
> use my own infrastructure. My clients pull upgrades from a gold
> server.
>
> http://www.infrastructures.org/bootstrap/pushpull.shtml
>
> There are many infrastructures available. Puppet is well known.
> There is also Ansible, Chef, Salt, others. I suggest taking a peek at
> one of those or others and adding some automation to your machines.
> It will take some effort up front but it will pay it back many times
> later with easier maintenance.
>
> Bob
Yes, I use Debian FAI to install the base stations by PXE and puppet
to make configurations. Therefore it is very easy for me to install a
new package or change a configuration files. But when bugs are not
corrected on Stable I always need to find a workaround.
One solution, suggested by Slavko, is to create my own repository and
correct the bugs myself. Maybe it is what I will do since it is very
simple in Debian to rebuild a package. But I need before to answer to
two questions :
1) What version number I need to give to my local packages so that
they will be updated immediately but overwrited on next stable release
? Is gdm-3.4.1-8-r1 authorized in Debian ? How change the package
version when rebuilding ? With dch ?
2) How priority is sets on package repository ? When I add
debian-backports the packages are not automatically installed but on
http://fai-project.org/download they are. How is this works ?
Thank you very much to all !
Baptiste.
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