James Carlson wrote: > 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. >
We've been talking about exactly such versioning of packages... this will become clearer when we get an approved project and the docs and source become available. -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
