On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 06:43:19PM -0700, Richards, Toby wrote: > 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
I have seen applications break after Windows upgrades, I have seen completely seamless OpenBSD upgrades. I don't think this is a realistic comparison to make. > 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). This seems to imply no realworld use? Couldn't be further from the truth. > 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. Not true. Don't upgrade at your own peril, because the security will fall behind. Being hacked is a more reasonable expectation with not upgrading production systems. > 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. Also not true. One person could easily manage 50 OpenBSD servers, they just need to skill up on the relevant management tools. > 4) I am oblivious to some upgrade path technique for FOSS operating > systems. > > Please enlighten me. We could lead you to the water, but would you drink? The best you could do is try OpenBSD out for yourself, and do some reading up.
