ESR: Goodbye Fedora

[Les Mikesell]

Steve Friedman wrote:
> On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 
>> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>>> On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 17:19:34 -0600,
>>>   Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> The one that matters is that fedora isn't suitable for machine that 
>>>> need to be stable and reliable.  I've always thought that a quick, 
>>>> easy solution to most surprises would be to let yum take a date/time 
>>>> option and ignore all updates after that time.  That way you could 
>>>> stay almost up to date on your critical machines while watching the 
>>>> mail list for complaints by people with the newer changes.  And, you 
>>>> could update a test machine and after testing, reliably update other 
>>>> boxes to the same versions that you tested even if new updates had 
>>>> gone in the repository.
>>>
>>> You'd probably want the time specified as an interval to lag, rather 
>>> than
>>> a date.
>>
>> That's trivial to compute, so it doesn't need to be part of the 
>> application. What I really want are reliable, repeatable updates once 
>> I've done one and tested on a non-critical box, and I'd also like it 
>> to play nice with a caching web proxy.  Using a random pick from a 
>> mirrorlist every run screws up both of those concepts, even if you 
>> could pin the timestamp of the last update you want to consider.
>>
>>
> 
> The workaround for this feature is trivial.  We set up our own local 
> repository (initially because updating a new config over the internet 
> was so slow compared with ethernet speeds, but now we do it with 
> installs and have eliminated swapping CDs).  Just push approved updates 
> (instead of blindly rsync'ing the part of the tree that interests you), 
> and you're done.

That's always sounded fairly horrible to me as a workaround for 
something that should be really simple.  My servers are widely 
distributed and not all of the same distribution/version so having to 
build the infrastructure of a local repository for each with hand-picked 
rpms doesn't sound like fun.  I'd probably try to automate something 
that made a list of installed rpm versions and fed that to another 
machine's yum as an easier approach.  Most of the servers are Centos, 
though and I've had pretty good luck with just trusting the 
repositories. The 3.x version even does something sensible when you use 
a proxy cache so I haven't put much effort into a workaround.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com