[1618] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Draft release-announce mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jeffrey I. Schiller)
Thu Jan 28 02:12:33 1999
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 23:12:20 -0800
From: "Jeffrey I. Schiller" <jis@MIT.EDU>
To: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
I've read your analysis and your proposed announcement. I buy...
-Jeff
Greg Hudson wrote:
> Based on the analysis I sent and some mulling, I'd like to plan to go
> ahead with the 8.2.17 patch release on Mon Feb 8. (The date is not
> terribly important to me but that's what Jonathon was leaning towards
> at the meeting.) I'd like to send mail to release-announce about the
> potential incompatibilities. Here is a draft.
>
> ---
>
> This note is to address the concerns of private Sun workstation
> administrators with regard to the 8.2.17 patch release, which
> introduces 46 Sun patches. We haven't ever made so many changes to
> Solaris in a patch release before, and the approach we took this time
> has raised some serious concerns for private workstation
> administrators who won't want to take the update immediately upon the
> field release.
>
> In response to these concerns, we have rescheduled the patch release
> for the evening of Monday, February 8 and have taken a careful look at
> the Sun patches to see what might break on a non-updated machine.
> Most of the Sun patches introduce localized bug-fixes without creating
> dependencies, but there are exceptions. We believe that any problems
> people will experience on non-updated machines will be confined to the
> following five sets of programs:
>
> 1. ld and elfdump
> 2. at, atrm, atq, and crontab
> 3. nismkdir, nistest, nis_cachemgr, nisinit, nisbackup,
> nisrestore, and rpc.nisd (NIS+ programs)
> 4. mailstats (an auxiliary sendmail program)
> 5. The native lp and lpstat
>
> (Note that cron jobs will continue to run just fine, and that Athena
> printing functions, both client and server, will continue to work
> properly.)
>
> The first two categories (ld, elfdump, at*, and crontab) have known
> dependencies on taking the update; on non-updated machines, they will
> fail with shared library errors. We will make available a short
> script which makes the minimal changes necessary to restore those
> programs' functionality as an alternative to taking the update (the
> script doesn't require a reboot or anything to take effect; it just
> makes some small updates to /usr/lib). The third, fourth, and fifth
> categories are programs which might have dependencies on the update,
> but which we couldn't easily test to make sure.
>
> If you rely on NIS+, the mailstats program, or the native print
> spooling programs on a private Athena Sun workstation which is
> inconvenient to update, please get in touch with us
> (release-team@mit.edu) as soon as possible so that we can address
> potential problems with those programs in more detail. As always,
> other comments or questions can also go to release-team@mit.edu.
>
> We apologize for the unusually high amount of disruption this patch
> release may cause and for the "you must update" hard line taken in the
> Sunday announcement with regard to the ld dependency.
