On Wed, 18 Jul 2007 01:14:52 +0100, Ken Moffat wrote: > More to the point, I've long thought that we don't really cover > "the long-term care of your LFS system" (e.g. I don't think we point out
Care and maintenance of any complicated entity, a house, a garage, a method of building an OS, maintaining an OS, a car, a job, or writing near-bulletproof code is as much of an art as it is a procedure--and it varies from one person to the next. What we can do is try to gently encourage new users, who may not be familiar with Xen and the Art of LFS Maintenance, into habits which will lead them to be good admins (both for themselves and for others, if that applies). As always there is reading required: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix- koans/ > OTOH, I think I can remember a large effort to prevent the book > being dumbed-down, so maybe this is something that should be obvious to > builders who intend to stay with LFS. That's also a very good point to recognize. It doesn't so much matter if we want people to stay, or if there are people who want to stay: what matters is if they do stay. If we involve ourselves deeply in every problem that they have then we will only frustrate ourselves and them. If we remain too aloof then the project will dwindle. There is a balance to be found by encouraging good practices and discouraging bad ones. Maintaining a system running a packaged distro on at least one machine will help the user to recognize things which need to be updated and give them insight how to go about it. When the set of packages that Debian Sid updates meshes nicely with the set of security alerts which I've seen in the last week then I know that I'm watching the right stuff. One last note on glibc updates: When Debian updates a glibc there aren't often many packages which need to be updated alongside of it. This must be due to a very careful watch by the devs on what changes are actually made in the glibc--and that may be related to social connections and manpower that LFS doesn't have (though I tend to believe that the LFS devs know how to stay on top of the bleeding edge of their respective areas of interest). The only consistent part of a glibc .deb update that I remember is that most (all?) active running services are restarted. That's about it. Yay for dynamic linking at runtime perhaps? -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
