Re: [tlug] Kana-Problems

[Joe Larabell <fred62@example.com>]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Josh Glover wrote:

> On 21/04/2008, Niels Kobschaetzki <n.kobschaetzki@example.com> wrote:
>
> > I like my desktop-system up to date and I have not the time to follow
> >  the changelogs of the 1000+ ports I have installed right now to check
> >  if it is necessary to install updates.
>
> If you don't have time to follow changelogs, then you almost certainly
> don't have time to fix a system when a blind update hoses it, right?

It sounds as if Niels is referring to the kind of "updates" that, for 
instance, RedHat does within a single release -- where you can pretty much 
be sure nothing major will break without having to check everything out 
yourself. He *did* say "as long as I don't do a distribution-upgrade".

But, that's not what I would call keeping the system up-to-date. One of 
the reasons I switched to Gentoo was because I didn't like having my 
system slowly drift away from the bleeding edge and having to re-install 
from CD/FTP every couple years in order to keep up with the times.

But, you have to admit, that bleeding edge has a price. I keep "system" 
relatively up-to-date but in "world" there are hundreds of updates that I 
have yet to emerge because a few of them are things I depend on (like 
Apache) and I don't have time to look into what changed. The last time I 
updated Apache, it turned out someone has re-written all the config files 
and it completely broke my installation (note, this is a personal desktop 
machine so while the borkage was a PITA, it was hardly a critical goof).

> Other than that, I don't update. And you know what? My machine keeps
> working the way I want it to.

Same here. But release-based distributions have different rules. There are 
*some* updates that the distro "guarantees" (to the extent they can) will 
not bork a running install.

---
Joseph L (Joe) Larabell            Never fight with a dragon
http://larabell.org/                    for thou art crunchy
http://thelemicleague.org/        and goest well with cheese.