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Old 27th March 2012
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Default is this a correct attitude ?

Hi !
thinking outloud :
why not going current to take advantage of this only-current feature , instead of waiting several months for 5.1 stable ... while still using the OS as a production server .. that is , stopping right there after installation is done .. no more changes .. no more syncing with newmoon packages ..etc
is this legitimately applicable ?
Thank you very much ..
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Old 27th March 2012
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by daemonfowl View Post
is this legitimately applicable ?
Fundamentally, you are asked why everyone doesn't run -current -- even in production.

The answer is that the risk of running into unknown behavior which will adversely affect downtime is unacceptable. The agreement they may have with their customers may be contractually binding to providing a prescribed amount of uptime. Unknown downtime caused by running OpenBSD's branch containing freshly developed code is considered to be too large a risk.

Whereas, -release & -stable have received greater scrutiny from the project developers. While there still may be issues which affect downtime, the changes of such are smaller.

Another reason for the use of -release or -stable is that the code used for these flavors are well-known & can be accessed through CVS tags. The same cannot be said for -current snapshots. If a problem is identified in a month-old snapshot, it is difficult to impossible to track down the exact code which may be running in that situation.
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Old 27th March 2012
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Think of -release as a snapshot. But... a snapshot where development of new features was halted, and then it was carefully tested by a lot of people over a long period of time, with discovered errors resolved and corrected.

----

The development cycle is typically 4 months of development and 2 months of testing, twice per year.
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Old 27th March 2012
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Ocicat , Jgimmi , thank you for your clearification !!
I still need to know if it is not insane on my part to enjoy a recent x feature on -current by going -current for a production server ..
Maybe it won't be a 100% risk-free .. do some of you ever do this ? for some similar reason
I mean running a production server with -current frozen at a certain point ..
(( eg. : OpenBSD 5.0 stable failed for X on Imac .. then I had to go -current .. then stopped there and started using it as a production server .. ))
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Old 27th March 2012
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by daemonfowl View Post
I still need to know if it is not insane on my part to enjoy a recent x feature on -current by going -current for a production server ..
Some people do run -current in production, but most of those understand the risk and:
  • don't have service level agreements (SLA) with their customers which requires solid uptime.
  • have enough redundancy in their topologies which counterbalances the loss of key systems.
It's your choice as to whether you run -current in production, but if it breaks, you get to pick up the pieces.

My suggestion to you is to develop a disaster plan which takes into account systems which need to be replaced/rebuilt. If it is acceptable for your Website to crash & be down for a month, then you don't need as stringent a disaster plan as other sites which exist only to facilitate business. If their sites go down, they don't make any money.
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Old 28th March 2012
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When I decide between -current or -stable, I ask myself what application is it that I need to be -current? For my workstation that would be firefox, but I don't need that on my server. I never had to upgrade any production server from -stable to -current but your needs may be different than mine.
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Old 28th March 2012
daemonfowl daemonfowl is offline
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Hi Puffy ! I agree here .. the thing is , I want to learn+test+use one machine both as a desktop and as a server .. this is no harm I bet since my server is but a simple personal non-profit webserver .. or intranet ftp server .. etc
there are some new ports that really tempt one's patience .. so we venture ahead .. :-)
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