* On 2017-01-06 at 22:40 GMT, Jesus Cea wrote:

> I am wondering what is going on, if this is regular business and if 15.4
> is better supported for security updates. I am using quarterly images
> because they are suppose to be "up to date", but I could use only yearly
> "LTS" releases if security updates are more timely. I have made a huge
> investment to be able to "redeploy" my environment in minutes to take
> advantage of quarterly releases, but security is a major concern too.
> When I asked those questions in the chat room months ago I was said that
> a typical vulnerability could take a couple of weeks "only".

One of the most important things to note is that the vulnerabilities
file is updated very quickly, and will often include issues that
aren't even fixed in the upstream software yet.  The aim is to provide
the administrator with as much information as possible, and they can
choose to disable the affected software if necessary until the issue
is resolved.

That said, there will of course be many times when we simply can't
keep up with all of the issues.  Generally the latest quarterly
release will be the most secure because it will have the latest
software, and will include backports provided by the pkgsrc-releng
team.  For LTS releases we (Joyent) need to backport these ourselves,
so while we prioritise backports to those branches before the latest
quarterly, the latest quarterly should still on the whole have fewer
vulnerabilities than any LTS.

> I fully realize than I am not paying anything for SmartOS, but I could
> consider donating time and expertise to improve the situation if I can
> make any difference. How can I help?

That would be perfect :)  We are always looking for more people to get
involved in pkgsrc, and it's the best way they can help.  The great
thing is that people of all abilities can get stuck in, helping out
with everything from trivial package fixes to rewrites of
infrastructure and supporting new platforms.

If there's something that particularly interests you, ping me on IRC
on Monday and I'd be happy to walk you through it to get started.

Ideally we'd want contributors to get involved in pkgsrc upstream so
that they can commit fixes directly, and I'm happy to sponsor folks
who have produced good patches and are interested in joining the
project.

> Does pkgsrc upstream addresses this timely?

We primarily rely on the pkgsrc upstream work by the pkgsrc-releng
team for backports, but they only maintain the latest branch, so
everything for LTS we need to do ourselves.  For important things like
OpenSSL I'll tend to do it all myself anyway.

Cheers,

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com


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