While my question involves other BSD's as well as Linux systems, I am asking this here because OpenBSD's philosophy is the most attractive to me.
I've got about 50 servers to manage. OpenBSD does have an Upgrade option, but does it upgrade the installed packages? As far as I can tell, it does not. I do very much appreciate the technology that has come from the OpenBSD project, yet it seems to me that most *free* operating systems do not fully support an upgrade path. I can't [fully] upgrade from one OpenBSD release to another (unless following STABLE gets me from one RELEASE to another, but AFAIK it does not). I cannot seamlessly upgrade from Free/PC-BSD 8.x to 9.x. Instead I must re-install from scrach. The same goes for CentOS/RHEL 5.x to 6.x, and for every version of Mint Linux. The two major commercial operating systems (considered to be evil by the FOSS community) easily upgrade from one version to the next. That's important in a real-life production environment. In 2001, I upgraded 200 workstations and 7 servers from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 without incident. I've had similar experience with all subsiquent MicroEvil systems. I do hate MicroEvil, but I can make only limited conclusions regarding the upgrade paths of other operating systems: 1) Your project exists only for the sake of doing the project, and for the technologies that it produces (such as OpenSSH). 2) Folks are expected to install a version of OpenBSD, but not upgrade because there's no reason to fix something that isn't broken. 3) OpenBSD is only for organizations who have so few servers or so many IT folks that re-installing everything from scratch is not inviably cumbersome. 4) I am oblivious to some upgrade path technique for FOSS operating systems. Please enlighten me. Respectfully Submitted, R. Toby Richards Network Administrator Superior Court of California In and for the County of San Luis Obispo (805) 781-4150
