[GLLUG] GLLUG

[Edward Glowacki]

On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 17:50, C. Ulrich wrote:
> For starters, it's easy and it works.

It works, if you have a printout of the "how to upgrade" document handy
and reference it continuously.  But I wouldn't say it's at all as easy
as it could be.  And the less-easy it is, the less often people will do
it.  For me, the biggest pain in rebuilding the core of the OS is the
final step: mergemaster.  For those that don't know, it's a script that
goes through your /etc/ directory and tries to upgrade all the
OS-installed config files there, giving you the option to just install
the new version or try to merge the old and new if you've made changes
to the defaults.  It asks you, one at a time, what to do with each file,
and it takes a lot of focus to keep track of what's going on.  Because
this is such a tedious step, I only do upgrades when I really have to. 

> With FreeBSD, if you follow the
> instructions and know what you're doing, your upgrade will almost
> certainly succeed. Knowing what you're doing is easy, too, since FreeBSD
> is very very well documented.

Those are two pretty big "if's"... and while the documentation is pretty
*good*, it and the procedure itself aren't particularly *newbie
friendly*.  Or for that matter, "sysadmin under stress and in a hurry"
friendly.  A big part of making things easier is not just for newbies,
but people that *could* do it but have better things to do with their
time.

> The ease and reliability with which FreeBSD can be updated far offsets
> the disadvantage of having to wait for it to compile, in my opinion.

Tell that to my GNOME upgrade... ;)  The half-dozen dependency failures
pushed my rebuild time to 3 days.  Part of that was because it would
fail while unattended and sit idle a while until I could fix the problem
and start it again, which was sometimes the next day.  Part was my
relatively slow machine (PIII 750).  No matter the reason, 3 days
without a desktop or a GUI while you're upgrading is painful... =(  And
yes, I know that GNOME is essentially an application and not the OS, but
since that line is pretty blurry in general and most systems handle them
the same way, I'm not gonna stress over it... ;)

Say what you will about Windows, but just having to click "OK" to
upgrade the OS is a pretty handy feature (licensing changes, multiple
reboots, and other Microsoft funny business aside).  Compare that to:

make buildworld
make installworld
make buildkernel
shutdown 
make installkernel
mergemaster
fastboot


It really all comes down to how much of the upgrade procedure requires
sysadmin intervention or control.  Do I need to be prompted to choose
between the old and new versions of
/etc/periodic/security/650.ip6fwlimit, or can the upgrade safely assume
that 99.9% of the people in the world doing the upgrade don't care and
just install the new version? (making a backup copy of the old version
for the other 0.1%...)


-ED

-- 
Edward Glowacki				glowack2 at msu.edu
GLLUG Peon  				http://www.gllug.org
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
                -- Jules de Gaultier