[OpenIndiana-discuss] Updates in OI

[Judah Richardson]

On Tue, May 4, 2021 at 7:36 AM Yassine Chaouche <
a.chaouche at algerian-radio.dz> wrote:

> Dear OI community,
>
> I was never fond of Rolling Releases.

I generally don't use them either unless they're the only way to get
decently recent packages. The only other rolling release I use is the pkg
latest repo on FreeBSD RELEASE. Of course, because it's a RELEASE version
it's not a full-stack rolling release in the usual sense.

I tried a couple times,
> it always ended in an unrecoverable system and me switching
> back to a classic LTS linux distro (I'm a linux user myself).
>
> It generally boils down to these two essential problems :
>
>   1- Never miss an update.

My rule for all my OSes on this end is "update early, update often."
Everything I have is updated at least monthly (typically in lockstep with
Patch Tuesday). OI itself gets a pkg update and reboot at that time every
month unless there's a broken package that needs an extra update to be
fixed.

Missing an update increases your
>      chances of breaking the system on next update.
>
Correct with all OSes. The bigger the gap between versions, the less
reliable/robust the update will be.

>
>   2- You can't install a package if your system is out of date.
>
I avoid the question entirely by doing a package manager update for any
repo before I install anything from that repo. Always. For OI, most of my
packages come from pkgsrc and pkgin update does not update the BE or base
OS, so no reboot is required.

>      This means that if you chose to not update the system, for
>      example because of a known problematic package,

I find this very rare.

you won't
>      be able to install new software until that package is fixed.
>
Correct. I once couldn't update FreeBSD for a while because doing so would
have removed Firefox from my system.

     A workaround would be to pin that package to its current
>      version so that it doesn't get updated, and unpin it once
>      it gets fixed on next update (but see 1 about missing
>      updates)
>
> Out of curiosity, does this also apply to OI ?
>
See above. If you use pkgsrc (and for all practical reasons you will since
otherwise OI's package availability is extremely limited relative to other
distros) then you can update packages from it without having to worry about
the underlying OS.

>
> -- Yassine
>
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