On Mon, 2004-09-20 at 21:24 -0700, Grant wrote:
> I've been very concerned with the possibility of an 'emerge -uD world'
> breaking any of my systems, but especially my server.
If that is so, then simply do not ever use `emerge world`
After all, assuming the ebuild is well written (they usually are) and
the dependencies are correct (they usually are too), then `emerge foo`
will result in an upgrade to libfoo, bar, and whatever else **if and
only if an update to those libraries is required by explicitly specified
dependencies**
The hidden benefit here is that rather than upgrading everything, all
the time, you only upgrade that which you need, AND YOU DON'T EXPOSE
YOURSELF TO HUNDREDS OF OTHER UNRELATED CHANGES.
Which is neat. This way, you only take a risk on specific software
you're upgrading, not the entire operating system. So if something is
borked, say, in this week's glibc, well, guess what? If you didn't
upgrade it, who cares? By tomorrow, it'll probably be fixed, but either
way it has no impact on you, so you probably won't even notice.
emerge -uD world == Debian Unstable.
Not doing emerge on a daily basis, results, in my experience in an
incredibly stable and low maintenance overhead system.
> The server
> just can't break.
Actually, that's a slightly more demanding standard than this mailing
list generally talks about - that's more about effective large
installation deployment, configuration management, high availability,
and roll out testing techniques. There's no such thing as a server that
will never break, so you need to engineer the problem at different
levels.
If this sounds interesting but you have no idea what I'm talking about,
you might start by reading
http://www.infrastructures.org/ and the
collected proceedings of past LISA conferences at
http://www.usenix.org/events/bytopic/lisa.html . There have also been a
number of GLEPs of late attempting to push the things necessary to
enable Gentoo to be feasibly used in high consequence environments, see
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0019.html and the mad debates on
gentoo-dev and elsewhere, eg
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/20270 . And, popping up
the stack slightly, you might be interested in a paper I wrote about
operations professionalism in systems environments,
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/reference/talks/SurvivingChange/ AfC
Sydney
--
Andrew Frederick Cowie
Operational Dynamics Consulting Pty Ltd
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