Andy Kosela wrote:
On Jun 25, 2008, at 3:46 AM, Peter Wemm wrote:
I think we still have FreeBSD-3.x machines in production. I know we
have FreeBSD-4.3. 99.9% of security issues don't affect us. We have
our own package system built on top of FreeBSD's pkg_add format and
have the ability to push packages to machines. If circumstances
warrant it, we can push a fix for something. It'll either push a new
binary or be a source patch that is compiled directly on the machines
in question. The machines run a custom software stack. More often
we push fixes for driver or performance fixes or things like timezone
updates.
Ports infrastructure do not support such old FreeBSD versions, so how
do you deal with that? Do you maintain your own CVS branches of
selected packages and backports necessary security patches? I guess it
demands considerable effort to compile the latest apache on FreeBSD
3.x or 4.x.
It would be easy to maintain 4.x compatibility in Yahoo's package
system. They probably only need a relatively small number of ports, and
there is no need to stay in sync with changes to the ports
infrastructure. Those changes are almost all completely gratuitous from
the point of view of deploying packages within a site since they are
changes to the *ports* infrastructure. The FreeBSD *package*
infrastructure has changed almost not at all over time (but yahoo have
their own package system anyway).
To the extent that the vendor applications still support old versions,
the model would be the same: vendor source + patches --> binary. You
can do that with a system based on the ports collection from last
century if you like :)
I would guess that Yahoo actually forked the ports system long ago (in
the 2.x days?) or never used it directly, and either port their changes
directly or by taking patches from freebsd ports.
Kris
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