Re: [tlug] Kana-Problems

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 21/04/2008, Niels Kobschaetzki <n.kobschaetzki@example.com> wrote:

> I like my desktop-system up to date and I have not the time to follow
>  the changelogs of the 1000+ ports I have installed right now to check
>  if it is necessary to install updates.

If you don't have time to follow changelogs, then you almost certainly
don't have time to fix a system when a blind update hoses it, right?

So stop blindly updating.

>  I do not really expect an update of ports to break my system.

Then adjust your expectations.

Remember, you are talking about keeping--in your words--1000+ ports up
to date. Would you expect to be able to keep 1000 pieces of software
up to date on a MacOS X or Windows system, with no update ever
breaking anything?

Modern desktop distros (and I include the BSDs here) are complex
beasts, with many intertwining tentacles.

I'd really advocate that you update only security-related stuff
automatically, which you should be able to do easily by either simply
trusting the FreeBSD security patches implicitly or by following the
proper mailing lists (I think Scott gave you info on this). Other
updates should only happen when you *know* the update fixes a bug or
provides a feature that you really want.

To use myself as an example: as a rule, I update nothing, save kernel
security fixes. I don't run any web-facing services on my personal
machines, so I don't care if Apache has a crippling security
bug--unless an attacker is able to access my loopback interface, I'm
safe from it. Only the kernel can bite me: if there is some clever way
to exploit the TCP window size scaling code to inject packets into the
buffer for say, the loopback interface, I may be screwed.

I update software when I need something, e.g. yesterday I updated
Amarok because the album cover art fetching feature had broken, and
the Amarok site's RSS feed mentioned that bug specifically in the
announcement of a new release.

And I update software when I want something, e.g. I updated to Firefox
3 beta because I want the vastly improved resource utilisation it
offers.

Other than that, I don't update. And you know what? My machine keeps
working the way I want it to.

-- 
Cheers,
Josh