ESR: Goodbye Fedora

[Steve Friedman]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Les Mikesell wrote:
> 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:
>>>>> 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.
>>>> 
>>> 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.
>> 
>> 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.
>

Your initial message said that you wanted to test the updates first.  So, 
although hand-picking isn't necessary, there will be some required admin 
interaction to update the test machine, test it, then approve the updates. 
The first and last steps can be one-liners.

Steve Friedman