Bart Smaalders writes: > Peter Tribble wrote: > > > Upgrading means testing and requalifying all my applications. At > > least under Solaris, patching never has. Under the current patching > > scheme, it's possible to get a fix for an individual bug; upgrading the > > whole package involves many more changes and significantly > > increasing the risk to the end user. > > > > This imparts a much greater weight to the mechanism of software > change than is appropriate. A patch can change every portion of > a package, or only a misspelling in a comment in an include file. > There is no semantic difference between a patch and upgrade; both > apply change to the system. Whether or not you need to requal all > your applications depends on your sense of paranoia and consequences > of things going wrong.
What it *really* ought to depend on is our advertised content. In other words, if we say that we're including only trivial changes that don't affect the way applications run, as we would usually do for patches, then it's as safe as it was before. If we say that we're including life-altering breakage, then look out. This comes back to release types (Major, Minor, Micro) and the labelling of what we ship. I don't think that the project proposal needs to address that off the bat, but I do think there needs to be a clear and explicit way to know exactly what it is one is installing -- preferably before it's installed. Historically, people have aliased "patch" to mean "least level of change" and "Solaris Minor" to mean "applications need to be requalified because we don't quite trust that binary guarantee." That's only one implementation of the scheme. Having "X.Y.Z" release numbers is one way to handle the problem, but there might be others. I don't much care how it gets done, so long as the documentation of the content is clear and understandable. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
