On 9/13/07, Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld at sun.com> wrote: > On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 22:28 +0100, Peter Tribble wrote: > > > What disadvantages do you see in treating patching as upgrading? > > > > Upgrading means testing and requalifying all my applications. > > Even if the change delivered by "upgrading" is exactly the same as the > change delivered by "patching" ?
But it isn't (or hasn't been in the past - patching in S10 updates is becoming much closer to a upgrade). In an upgrade, you go from version X to version Y and all changes 1 to N to the code are included, whether you want them or not. In a patch, you stay at version X, and only some subset of the changes are included. Support matrices for commercial software essentially insist on this model. My own (painful) experience of managing Linux distributions where upgrading components was the way to get fixes was that it regularly broke our applications. > > At > > least under Solaris, patching never has. Under the current patching > > scheme, it's possible to get a fix for an individual bug; > > in practice, it's only possible to do this via an IDR or point patch, > and those are only rarely generated. Generally you get several bugfixes > together. Well, yes, I didn't mean literally one bugfix per patch. But the general principle is to minimize the changes you need to make the system in order to fix one specific issue. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
