[LUAU] Fedora or Debian

R. Scott Belford scott at belford.net
Thu May 27 10:52:03 PDT 2004


Gary Dunn wrote:
> 
> How does Debian deal with security issues? For example, if Apache issues
> a security alert and an upgrade to correct the vulnerability, how
> quickly does Debian make the update available?

 From the Debian Site:

"Debian takes security very seriously. Most security problems brought to 
our attention are corrected within 48 hours."

http://www.debian.org/security

As long as you are using Debian Stable, you will be able to apply the 
upgrade by typing apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.  Security patches 
are applied to the Testing and Unstable trees, but not with the same 
urgency and commitment as Stable.

> 
> At work I run FreeBSD in a production environment. I used to follow the
> conservative path and only run RELEASE, but I ran into problems where an
> upgraded application from the ports collection would not compile due to
> library mismatches. Now I track STABLE, and have had fewer problems.
> 
> In general, the need to react quickly to security updates has made the
> job of upgrading at lot more of a challenge.

I would say that the conservative path would be to track stable.  The 
FreeBSD team tests releases until they become stable.  When a release 
reaches the point of production stability, in the opinion of the team, 
the name is changed to stable.  What FreeBSD calls a release, Debian 
calls Testing.

 From the FreeBSD site:

"Compared to the existing line of 4.X releases, the first few 5.X 
releases may have regressions in areas of stability, performance, and 
occasionally functionality.

For these reasons, the Release Engineering Team <re at FreeBSD.org> 
specifically discourages users from updating from older FreeBSD releases 
to 5.2-RELEASE unless they are aware of (and prepared to deal with) 
possible regressions in the newer releases. Specifically, for more 
conservative users, we recommend running 4.X releases (such as 
4.9-RELEASE) for the near-term future. We feel that such users are 
probably best served by upgrading to 5.X only after a 5-STABLE 
development branch has been created; this may be around the time of 
5.3-RELEASE.

(FreeBSD 5.X suffers from what has been described as a ``chicken and 
egg'' problem. The entire project has a goal of producing releases that 
are as stable and reliable as possible. This stability and reliability 
requires widespread testing, particularly of the system's newer 
features. However, getting a large number of users to test the system, 
in a practical sense, means building and distributing a release first!)"

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2R/early-adopter.html

> 
> Gary Dunn

--scott




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