[Gllug] Wide eyed and Innocent new members.

[Stephen Harker]

Adam Bower wrote:
> Stephen Harker wrote:
> 
>>
>> Do you mean dist-upgrade to mean taking a machine from say Potato to 
>> Woody, or do you mean a daily security update which only ever upgrades 
>> things that need patching?
> 
> 
> Going from slink to potato, is what I have done in the past on machines 
> with users in a commercial setting, and I have gone from slink to potato 
> to woody at home on the same box over the past couple of years.

Right. Well, in that case, I would be very careful about upgrading a 
"production" machine from $version to $version+1 using anything at all 
without testing it all first on an identical machine or something. But 
that is just common sense. If there wasn't a real need to upgrade the 
server and the older version (eg potato) was still being supplied with 
security patches and was working fine, I wouldn't even do the upgrade.
But as for keeping on top of security updates, "apt-get update ; apt-get 
dist-upgrade" run from /etc/cron.daily and a sensible "sources.list" 
seems to do an excellent job of keeping a running machine tight. 
Occasionally it barfs on a download or something but I check it fairly 
regularly. Debian are pretty conservative with these updates and are 
pretty rigorous about testing these patches first so it practically 
always "just works". At least this is my personal experience. Others may 
have a different story.
Steve


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