WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-users

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

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.

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users