Topic: Updates for SME

[byte]

Hi,

I'm interested in anyone who wants to maybe join me in setting up an update system on contribs to update our SME boxes?

I have seen lots of updates/patches/bugfixes in certain developers contribs section and I have seen Greg Zartman nice script although its only for his testing would be good.

Another thing I would like to see happen is that we have another topic on the main forum with title called UPDATES that way we can keep track of updates, I would maybe suggest lock the UPDATES forum from people posting (if they do require help use the existing methord)

Would be good to see developers to help with this as they are doing now

Whats you thoughts? Least this could be the start of the community sorting it self out and all digging in together

Byte

[wellsi]

This sounds good,

At the moment it is possible to use yum and see many possible updates - but what should actually be taken and  what else is there?

I can help with testing

Ian

[RavenIV]

this is a good idea.

but first we have to solve the basic problems of the community.

cheers

[mbachmann]

Hi byte, i wanna join. Does it makes sense to list updates for "deprecated" versions or should we go only for 6.x? I run two 6.0.1.01, one in server gateway, one in server only mode, one with and one without yum. Should we wiki it or topic it in forums?

[wellsi]

I would suggest that only 6.x is covered. Anyone using an earlier vesion is recommended to upgrade. Also given a finite and small amount of resource it makes sense not to spread too thinly.

Although not directly relevant I have started some wiki pages that attempt to track new developments. I expect that these will mainly cover contribs, but should also track changes to major packages - like rsync that is on the July page.

See:
http://no.longer.valid/phpwiki/index.php/New%20Development%20Announcements

[hdaei]

How about moving certifed updates (whatever they are...) around via bittorrent?  The idea flows something like this...

Give an installer the option of allowing "update sharing" witha very low QOS setting so as to not interfere with business traffic (unused bandwidth only).  When SME "publishes" and update, it automatically gets spread to all participating servers via bittorrent, reducing load and greatly improving availability.

Thoughts?

[RavenIV]

I would suggest that only 6.x is covered. Anyone using an earlier vesion is recommended to upgrade.

not a good idea.
for SME 5.5 and earlier -> OK.
for SME 5.6 -> Not OK, because it has no security holes when it has all updates (SME 5.6u6)

cheers

[RonM]

Please pardon my confusion, but isn't a structured update list for 6.0.x the output we hope to see from the Package Maintenance team?

As for listing the updates for SME 5.6, I'm for it (if there are people that actually want to do the work). I don't want to have it necessarily to help people who haven't upgraded yet - at some point the effort to _not_ upgrade has to be more than the effort to upgrade, or, why risk it? I think that having the information available, in a useful, change-log type of format, would help us understand our distro better, and grow as a community. I think that more of us are going to need to move up into rolling rpms, creating form magick pages to control properties in the config dbase, etc., etc., and detailed info on the distro will help us do that. I feel the same way about potential security vulnerabilities.

I have some of the earlier change logs/release notes linked here : http://no.longer.valid/phpwiki/index.php/SME%20History

If you do build something, maybe we could link it in the How to pages, under SME or something. I don't think that it would cause much confusion, as long as we present it properly, so that newcomers know 6.0 is the way to go.

[mbachmann]

Wow, lesson in history by RonM. No time to read in detail yet.

Wellsi, it try to keep the Dev wiki updated. I don't wanna track the "lower than 6.0" branch. If there are people who want to track it: fine, go.

[wellsi]

... update the pages.

http://no.longer.valid/phpwiki/index.php/New%20Development%20Announcements

I did and will try to keep it updated.

Thanks for updating the July page, I also like how you have formatted the new entries.  Having this page updated made it easy to add all the July entries into the How To Classification - and thanks also for adding your feedback to so many of them.

Regarding the 5.6 issue I support the view that if someone wants to track the 5.6 specific packages then they can add this information. Personally I won't be doing this and the main reason is Gordon's quote from March (original in DevInfo archives).

I only develop and test on 6.0 Anyone running 5.5 or earlier is unwise, and anyone running 5.6 should upgrade to 6.0 in any case.

One next big step in keeping up to date would be to track the non-esmith core packages. How is it decided which repositories are 'trusted' and which updates are taken. For some pacakages like CVS I intend to take the fedora-legacy update, but I am more wary about taking a new kernel or apache as I do not have sufficient knowledge to know if this would adversely affect the SME Server.

So,
 Where do updates come from?