On Tue, 12 Jul 2011 08:32:55 +0200 (CEST) Francois Pussault wrote: > Hi, > I upgrade only when i need to, or when a version is done, to buy CD > & give money to the project. > So twice a year maximum, but most often on spring version once a year
Really it depends on the apps you run. If you use fvwm and Xorg even then your unlikely to need to upgrade for quite a while (looking at exploit lists), add firefox and KDE or something which has received security warnings then when you have to upgrade will vary depending on necessity and your will to upgrade versus your will/ability and the varying ease to work around dependency problems in applications you use. I've been busy and thankfully just broke my record for keeping firefox upto date on desktops at 9 months but have to upgrade now. If you do this don't expect any help without using a snapshot to verify an issue on a Generic kernel first. For a base firewall you can choose to upgrade often for non security bug fixes or judging from it's past record run it for years and years whilst laughing at all the Linux boxes that could have been owned due to kernel exploits. If you think about it every major kernel exploit means that for all that time you were at risk and still are untill the next one. So whilst the risk may be small the potential and best practice is to constantly have to wipe your box. Security support for base could be said to be years and years but of course, non existent verbally after 6 months or non existent because it's generally not needed. You must keep track of what you add to systems of course but the mantra of just installing the latest package isn't a must and can be educational, especially if your configs prevent some of those exploits or as often is the case, they don't affect you.
