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Never update anything

blog.kronis.dev

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61–70 of 288 posts

Re: Never update anything

#61

Post by tux3 »

Taywee wrote: post #57
michaelt wrote: post #27

I've got some sympathy for this perspective. It's frustrating when you update in order to get the latest security updates - and you get forced to do a bunch of pointless busywork because some asshole has made some arbitrary change like deciding that 'which' is deprecated now.

> arbitrary change like deciding that 'which' is deprecated now. I kind of hate that this is going to live on as some example when the actual event was somebody proposing it, it failing in some builds on testing, and then a vote deciding against it. It was an example of good project governing preventing breakage, but for some reason it's already being remembered as the opposite.

The Technical Committee had to step in and vote, so in that sense the last resort worked.

But a good migration is a quiet migration. When internal Debian discussions reach the user's stderr and causes builds to fail, the system has failed.

There's only two ways to remember this sort of kerfuffle. Not at all, or as a lesson in deprecating things smoothly.

Re: Never update anything

#62

Post by TeMPOraL »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #55
encryptluks2 wrote: post #2

Better yet, if you don't want updated software, then why are you installing it? Just use a versioned Linux distro be done with it.

Because many times security updates are tied to fancy changes nobody asked for but consumers are expecting.

Worse, they're often tied to changes nobody asked for or wanted, including the customers in particular, and importantly, you can't tell which kind of update you'll get.

Re: Never update anything

#63

Post by yuliyp »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #32

I literally never update anything unless it is not working. Quite happy here with Firefox 66.x on Ubuntu LXDE 14.x, which is what happened to come with this particular device. I have an iPad running iOS 8.x, which I'm also happy with, especially when I do testing on the clusterfucks that are later iOS and Firefox releases. Browsing a handful of reputable text-based websites from behind a NAT, I don't see the problem.…

This works at small scale (read: a small startup or for your own machine). It begins to fall apart once you have dozens of services each deployed at some time in the past 5 years, and no clue whether any of them are safe to update, or even validate.

Re: Never update anything

#64

Post by xet7 »

shimonabi wrote: post #39

I upgraded my Ubuntu distribution last week and my old Xerox Phaser laser printer stopped working over the network. Something like this should never happen. I hate spending my weekends troubleshooting the Samba configuration. Maybe I will connect the printer to a Windows VM.

Sorry, newest Windows also has printing broken. No luck there.

Re: Never update anything

#65

Post by mikeklaas »

Waterluvian wrote: post #13

AWS: “Postgres 9.6 is old. On January 22 we will forcibly update your instances to 12. We hope you noticed this alert. We certainly didn’t email you about this. You’d better get off your ass and test/fix your clients for any potential issues.”

whoa, do you have a link?

Re: Never update anything

#66

Post by AshamedCaptain »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #44
shimonabi wrote: post #39

I upgraded my Ubuntu distribution last week and my old Xerox Phaser laser printer stopped working over the network. Something like this should never happen. I hate spending my weekends troubleshooting the Samba configuration. Maybe I will connect the printer to a Windows VM.

This is why I badly want all updates and rollbacks to be as declarative and simple as Git commands. "Be on this version. Now."

For workstation use I most definitely don't. Linux 5.13 has several regressions that make it unbootable on my system. Sure, i can btrfs/nix/ehatever rollback to 5.12 pretty easily.... and then what? Stuck in 5.12 for thr rest of my life? Hope that someone fixes it by chance?

What i mean is that I value decent changelogs, ability to diff changes between package versions, etc. much more. When a package regresses on my desktop, my next task is sadly to try to debug it.

Re: Never update anything

#67

Post by Negitivefrags »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #53
travisd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually just reverted this change within the last week (of course with accompanying “we love listening to your feedback!!!1!” eyeroll inducing messaging).

What I always say about this kind of thing is not "It's ok now because they un-did it." but "It's still not ok because they tried." If they are the kind of people who would try something, then they are still the same people and that problem did not go away. They will try something else again, and may in fact already be failing to work to my advantage right now in ways I just can't see. Once you know that, I prefer to…

So basically you must be 100% perfect all the time and are never allowed to make any mistakes.

This is one of the attitudes that makes the internet so toxic IMHO.

Re: Never update anything

#69

Post by dudeman13 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #58
moonchrome wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like the author mentions in the backporting section, if you don't update you'll fall behind maintained version and then you don't get security updates and upgrading is a huge chunk of work that has to be tackled as a giant step. Depends on your priorities and timeline, not updating is the most straightforward example of creating technical debt.

Conversely, not updating until you can't not update anymore is often the optimal approach, because when you're eventually forced to update, you deal with potential breakage just once . The amount of hassle around updating does not scale with the amount of updates you missed.

You deal with it just once, but you'll still have to more or less deal with every major breaks that would have been easily detected if the patch wasn't huge.

Sauce: had to deal with that recently. It was not pleasant.

I'd rather deal with 50 points of failure spread over 5 years than 50 points of failure once. Far less stressful, far easier to diagnose.

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