[kwlug-disc] maintaining vs upgrading

[John Van Ostrand]

----- Original Message -----
> Mandriva 2010.2 Powerpack seems to have been released today for all
> you
> Mandriva fans (I think that's pretty much just me these days).
> 
> I noticed that Mandriva has a maintenance option:
> http://store.mandriva.com/product_info.php?cPath=149&products_id=490
> 
> Does that not seem odd? Why would I subscribe to get continued updates
> on a previous version instead of subscribing to current versions. It's
> not like MS where new versions are a new OS, the different versions on
> Mandriva are pretty much seamless transitions.
> 
> Perhaps I'm missing something obvious as to why that would make sense
> to do.

I don't know about Mandriva, but in Red Hat/Fedora parlance and upgrade means new functionality, possibly at an API or library level. In other words maintenance updates are bug fixes and not functionality changes so installed programs and configurations should just work. Upgrades mean you should test to see if your system still works.

We favour maintenance updates on servers that need decent uptime. That way we don't have down time or time consuming migrations. My desktop get's both. I update until I have time to upgrade to a new version.

In my experience we've seen configurations of things like sendmail and bind stop working because the new software in the upgrade has new options. We've seen proprietary applications and off-distro packages that need tweaking or upgrade when we upgrade. This generally doesn't happen on updates.

-- 
John Van Ostrand 
CTO, co-CEO 
Net Direct Inc. 
564 Weber St. N. Unit 12, Waterloo, ON N2L 5C6 
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Linux Solutions / IBM Hardware