Re: [Xen-users] debian squeeze, xen and a very big problem.

[Simon Hobson <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mauro wrote:

> I can't believe that a serious distribution like debian do not do
> tests before suggest an upgrade.
As Scott says, for production systems you either have to test things 
yourself, or you accept that possibly an upgrade may break your 
system. Debian (and the other distributions) do do a **LOT** of 
testing - they have a whole QA setup just to handle testing etc.
BUT they rely on the package maintainers/contributors to do most of 
the functional testing - the distribution testing is (I believe) 
mostly to ensure everything installs cleanly, there aren't broken 
dependencies, etc.
The thing is, once you get past the trivial (and both the Linux 
kernel and Xen are very much non-trivial) it is simply impossible to 
test every possible combination of software and usage cases. That's 
not "difficult", but "impossible" - unless you have a near infinite 
number of systems and people to run the test scenarios.
I understand how frustrating it is for you, I've been hit by this 
sort of thing before. You either have to have a test/QA setup and 
test all upgrades before going live, or you upgrade live systems and 
have a plan to backtrack what you upgraded. The last one I had was an 
incompatibility between (IIRC) Squirrelmail and (IIRC) one of the 
Perl elements it depends on - leading to inability to log in as a 
user. I had to downgrade the bits I'd upgraded, then upgrade them one 
at a time until I found the problem. Fortunately it got fixed at some 
point.

Guy Roussin wrote:

> Use http://snapshot.debian.org/
Wow, I wish I'd known about that before - several times I've found 
myself needing older packages and struggled to find them.
--
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.

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