[ On Thursday, March 20, 2003 at 14:54:04 (-0600), Frederick Bruckman wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: lpwrapper
>
> IMHO, *that* would suck. Most of us are free to upgrade the base
> system or X or packages independently as the need arises, or as the
> whim strikes us, and you'd lose that.

I agree that requiring a full system update (i.e. base + packages) every
time you do an update is not for everyone -- however people who deal
with criticlal 24x7 production systems will undoutably see the benefits
of rolling in a fully upgraged and fully tested replacement system.  :-)

Even on my development systems I'm happy to just upgrade the odd package
on occasion and to only update very critical individual components of
the base system when necessary.  When I do full base updates on them I
still do more or less the same scratch and rebuild I do with production
systems.

In the few cases where I have to update a critical component of the base
system on one of my development machines (i.e. on those systems where I
don't install packages in /usr), and when that's easiest done through
pkgsrc (e.g. bind), I do in fact generally do what Greywolf suggested
and simply replace any matching base system files with symlinks to their
updated /usr/pkg versions.  I suspect if I were to want to install CUPS
on such a machine then that's what I'd do with it as well (assuming I
didn't need/want the base lpd any more).

One major problem I still have with replacing base system components
with add-on packages, regardless of whether I install the latter in
/usr/pkg or directly in /usr, is there's no clean way to remove any
un-replaced remnants of the original base-system version.  This can
leave critical security flaws on a system even though fixed software has
been installed.  Ultimately this will hopefully best be solved by
registering packages for all the major easily-replacable components of
the base OS.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
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