Re: Status of revivesa

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:57:25 +0100
Mindaugas Rasiukevicius <rmind%NetBSD.org@localhost> wrote:

> Quentin Garnier <cube%cubidou.net@localhost> wrote:
> > > Or, does the "compatibility problem" only affect chroot
> > > environments where any base libraries must not be updated?
> > 
> > Yes.  But all of that has already been discussed, you know.  You
> > could have read the archives.
> > 
> > The thing is, system administrators, which is our target in this
> > discussion, please keep that in mind, tend to be rather conservative
> > when it comes to upgrading machines.  The more conservative they
> > can be, the happier they will be.
> 
> Well, such "conservatism" could be called "laziness". Fair enough, and
> understandable. However, it does not mean that we should taint kernel
> with 3000+ lines (which invade all threading, and even mutex
> implementation) to support very specific compatibility needs. But
> yes, from my daily practise, often administrators just ignore
> software engineering points..
> 
> Looking at real world, business and administrators somehow survive
> with systems which break compatibility often. For critical production
> systems, quality assurance / testing people provide entire upgrade
> plan, etc. That does not mean we should stop doing good job on
> compatibility support, but read my first paragraph again.
> 
"Conservatism" is descriptive; "laziness" is editorial and pejorative.
But for every editorial opinion, there's an opposite one.  In fact, I'd
been about to post that system administrators *should* be
conservative.  I learned the system administration mantra "never
install .0 of anything" close to 40 years ago; nothing I've seen since
then -- including quality assurance schemes, test plans, and the like
-- have changed my mind.  Sure, you do those things.  First, they don't
always do the trick.  Second, the sysadmin group is definitely
overloaded, understaffed, and underappreciated.  Third, when things go
bad guess who gets blamed?  No, not the vendors who shipped cruddy
software.

I don't have a strong opinion one way or another on revivesa.  I do,
however, have plenty of sysadmin experience -- yes, despite the fact
that I'm a professor -- and I guarantee it isn't "laziness".

                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb