Re: Constant up dates, repeated reboots

Robin Sheat <[email protected]> Mon, 14 Jul 2014 14:11:05 +1200
Newsgroups	gmane.org.user-groups.linux.dunedin.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Worik Stanton schreef op ma 14-07-2014 om 13:21 [+1200]:
> I was talking with the Open BSD folks, and it was a different
> conversation, but a side remark was made about exactly this difference.

A typical BSD installation has a huge amount less installed software
than a typical Ubuntu installation.

> Even the security updates are some times only tangential to security.
> But I cannot recall a specific example so I will wait till I see one.
> 
> Remember what happened to the boy who cried wolf?

What's the alternative? Not update? Imagine the news that would cause.

> Exact opposite of my experience.  More updates leading up to upgrade and
> post upgrade major software failures and unexpected gotchas.  Like the
> famous complete change in GUI

They don't owe it to you to keep doing things in ways that are getting
outdated and harder to maintain. (Part of) their job is to move things
forward. Ideally things shouldn't break, and I do admit that I tended to
slightly dread each ubuntu release because it'd break a set of new
things (while fixing the things I'd unconsciously work around, so it
felt like a bit of a loss.) I haven't really noticed this in recent
releases however ('cept with evolution, which is very much a one step
forward/one step back type program it seems: one bug fixed, one bug
[re]introduced.)

>  and my recent experience of going apache
> 2.2 to 2.4  I read the config file diffs, but there was no indication
> that the virtual hosts config files would change format and name. Me
> reading the diffs, I am sure, is minority behaviour and a waste of time.

If you have a production server, you run the upgrade on your staging/UAT
systems first to work out the kinks. You'd rather they remain on Apache
2.2 for a 5-year server release? 2.2 probably won't be maintained that
long. Things move on, you need to keep up. There's no option.

You have these problems, but the only real "fix" is to make things worse
for everyone. The best thing for people wanting to be a bit conservative
is go from LTS to LTS (e.g. that's how I set it up for my parents.)

You know what happened when people were concerned by Debian Squeeze
ending its supported life a few months ago? They stepped up and give it
an extended support cycle.


> Side Note:
> ~$ cat /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs
> cat: /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs: No such file or directory

Oh, it's in /var/run, so it won't be there straight after boot. I expect
that something happens to regenerate it. Most likely running updates.

In my case, it contains:

$ sort /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs | uniq
dbus
linux-base
linux-image-3.13.0-30-generic
linux-image-3.13.0-31-generic
linux-image-3.13.0-32-generic
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-30-generic
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-31-generic
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-32-generic

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