[481] in athena10
Versioning in Athena 10
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Thu Sep 4 12:18:20 2008
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From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: athena10@mit.edu
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Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2008 12:17:34 -0400
A couple of questions about /etc/athena/version:
-On my debathena-workstation machine, /etc/athena/version says "Debian-
Athena Workstation...". Presumably "Workstation" there does not mean
-workstation, but rather means "not a server" as it always has, right?
-I know we're moving away from the patch release model, but I'd still
like some easy way to determine quickly and remotely whether a machine
is up to date. For example, if a private workstation is behaving
weirdly, one of the first things we do is "athinfo hostname version"
and then we can easily say to a user over the phone "Oh, that machine
is running 9.4.30, you should upgrade as soon as possible". I don't
currently have a good way to do that with Athena 10. "athinfo
packages" and manually looking at the output is too time-consuming for
over-the-phone support. Is there any way we can offer some sort of
versioning with Athena 10? Obviously, releasing new versions of
every single package just to bump a version number is not feasible,
but perhaps we can move to some sort of quarterly-update or "service
pack" model, where Athena 10.1 is defined as a set of packages and a
minimum version for each package, and Athena 10.2 is defined as a new
set of minimum version numbers. While there will obviously still be
machines at different states between updates, we will at least be able
to say something like "Oh ,you're running Athena 10.1, that's 4 months
old, you should update immediately."
-Jon
