On Thursday 04 March 2010 15:30:25 Bret S. Lambert wrote: > On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 03:12:35PM -0500, nixlists wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:28 PM, <and...@msu.edu> wrote: > > > If you don't have a good understanding of things, I'd say you should > > > > By good understanding do you mean ability to read and write system > > code, and intimate familiarity with *nix internals? > > I'd imagine he meant a basic understanding of unix systems in general.
Yes, a basic understanding, plus the understanding that you need to "catch" a set of commits completely. That requires some understanding of the code at some level. Fortunately messing that up only means that you have to wait and update again, and not make the mistake of posting on a mailing list that something is wrong. I just did this, with the new distributed package builder that Marc Espie has redone--had I paid more attention, I would have seen that new stuff was added, which fixed the particular problem I had. > > > ... > > > > > not follow -current on machines that are critical to you. I do use > > > > -current > > > > ... > > > > It seems the opinion on running current in production ranges from > > being overly optimistic to being very cautious. If running -current in > > production is only recommended for people who are intimately familiar > > with the internals, doesn't that exclude many if not most users? > > if "intimate familiar[ity] with the internals" means being able to damn > read instructions, then yes. You're making this out to be far harder > than it has to be. If you're able to follow instructions, you can > run -stable or -current, the docs are there to do so. What you need to be able to do is be able to jump back to a previous system if the new -current system does something bad. Now, this is just as true if you only jump from -stable to -stable system, but I have encountered a huge number of people who don't get the idea that an upgrade always has the possibility of messing up, and for a production system its a grand idea to be able to get back up, quickly. --STeve Andre' [snip]
