Escaping

[Jeremy Brown]

Bob Shaffer wrote:

>I would really like to be able to run a command every month, week, or day
>that would upgrade all of the software on my system.  Regardless of what
>piece of software or what kind of software it is, I would like to just be
>able to upgrade it no questions asked and not have to wait until a new
>"release version" becomes available and upgrade everything then.  More
>importantly, I think that the whole EOL thing is nonsense.  Every program
>that makes up everything in Linux is constantly being improved, having
>security vulnerabilities corrected and bugs fixed, etc.  Could I
>conceivably be able to set it up yum, up2date, or something so that when
>FC2/3/4/etc come out, I'm already running them, or am I doomed to always
>have to upgrade only when the new versions are released?
>  
>

You can do this pretty well within a release, so long as you keep tabs 
on what packages are being updated.  I tend to just do this manually, 
myself.  I get Fedora security notifications in my email, and then 
typically once a week, I ssh into all the Fedora machines here, "yum 
update", and "yum upgrade".  I *could* automate it, but it takes so 
little time to do it manually--maybe 15 minutes at the most--and keeps 
me well aware of what software is running on our machines.  It's also 
nice because if a critical service (mail, webserver) is being upgraded, 
I can do some simple testing to make sure the upgrade went smoothly.  
With all of that taken into account, I'd say I spend between 20 and 30 
minutes a week on updates of 4-5 machines, and that's arguably more time 
than I really need to spend.

It's a bit different when new versions of a Linux distribution are 
released, since new releases typically contain larger changes.  For 
example, SELinux will be introduced in FC2; that's not the sort of 
change you would want to just automatically have applied to your 
critical servers.  Although you probably won't have to pop in an install 
disc to get that change; you will likely still be able to update your 
system to FC2 with yum.

>The one distribution that I've been looking at most recently and appears
>to have this feature is "Gentoo Linux".  It appears that one could install
>their initial release, run a command something like "emerge world", and
>soon be running a release more current then their last.  The "releases"
>they use are fairly meaningless in this sense - more like snapshots that
>are made of the distribution at some interval.  I'm wondering if this is
>possible with Fedora and/or if it ever will be.
>  
>

Take it from me; I've administered several Gentoo systems before, and I 
do *not* consider it a stable distribution.  The RedHat and Fedora crews 
are committed to producing a well thought-out, well-tested 
distribution...binary packages that must meet certain requirements in 
order to be included in the "stable" branch of the distribution.  What 
the Gentoo crew produces is more a hodgepodge (sic?) of random, 
poorly-tested packages combined to make a semi-usable system.

Not that that's a bad thing...it's actually got some pretty neat 
features if you want to use for a desktop system.  But "emerge world" 
doesn't always work like you think it will.  Often things break, and 
when they do, the Gentoo packaging system is much harder to deal with 
than a binary packaging system like RPM.

>I like Fedora, but I hate upgrading.  I do way to much customisation with
>my system for simply using the "upgrade" option in the installer for every
>new release to be a realistic possibility.  In the past I have tried this
>and it ends up creating more work than just backing everything up and
>doing a clean install followed by many hours or days of reconfiguration.
>
>What options do I have, if any, to accomplish anything similar to what I'm
>talking about with Fedora Core?
>  
>

You really only have two choices: put up with Fedora's volume of 
updates, or choose another Linux distribution.  As Duncan Brown said in 
his reply post, RedHat Enterprise Linux is fairly cheaply priced for 
what you get, and they'll have fewer updates, although you'll likely 
find yourself running older software (which can be good or bad, 
depending on how you look at it).  I use several other 
distributions--Slackware and Debian, namely--and find that they are well 
suited for some tasks that Fedora simply is not.  But, I expect you 
won't find a distribution that completely eliminates the "crud factor" 
with regards to automatic updates.  And I don't think the updater in 
Fedora is by nature any better or worse than those of Debian or 
Slackware (in fact, you can use Debian's apt to keep Fedora up to date).

Jeremy