On 01/02/14 09:39, Gaetan wrote:
There is not only API change. Sometime, from a minor version to another, a feature get silently broken (that is silent regression). While it might not impact libA which depends on it, but it may fail libB which also depends on it, but with a previous version.
Silent regressions are the exceptional case though, not the norm. As a general rule, upgrades are important and necessary, at least for security reasons. It's kind of up to developers, up to distro maintainers, and certainly up to mission-critical sysadmins, to choose software (libs, and apps which use those libs) which are QA'd well enough to avoid this. Breakage SOMETIMES happens, but, much like recovering from a failed write to disk, you just have to weigh the odds, try it, then back up if it didn't work out. In fact, you could think of the process of upgrading a library as simple write followed by a verify. If you do it properly, like a good admin would, it'll all be wrapped in a transaction that you can roll back. BUT, the important part is that you'll probably still need to upgrade versoin x.19->x.21, even if upgrading x.19->x.20 fails for some reason.
Either you have a system which just works, isn't connected to the net, has no bugs, and no security risks associated with it, or you upgrade sooner or later. In most cases, if you're acting responsibly, you CANNOT just install version x.19, call that a working system, and forget about it, installing x.21 only for newer customers / systems. Not if those systems are connected to the internet, at least.
-- Lee _______________________________________________ Rust-dev mailing list Rust-dev@mozilla.org https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
