vulnerability of Linux

[John Summerfied]

Steffen Kluge wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 14:13 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
>>Respectfully, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. I update
>>my system about once a month.
> 
> 
> Why is it safer to update 10 packages once a month than 0.33 packages
> every day?

If _I_ do the update, I see that it's done and I see what is done. The 
information is in my head and my prospects of making a connexion are good.

Also, if someone released a broken package, there's a good chance I will 
find out and/or it will be fixed before I install it.

The serious folk have test systems on which to test and evaluate the 
reliability of the fixes on their systems. It would not surprise me at 
all if they normally only start to update when the get their updated 
CDs, and that they take some weeks to go through the testing cycle.

I used to be a systems programmer (think sysadmin) reponsble for 
maintaining mainframe computers used for making social security payments 
throughout Australia, and we did not install fixes unless something was 
broken for us.

If we needed to reinstall (maybe to support new hardware), then we would 
use the latest release of our software.


-- 

Cheers
John

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