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Hi,

After this month's maintenance, which includes quite a few software updates/changes, I'd like to come up with a coherent strategy for updating software. The aim is to balance the inconvenience of updates (which can require changes from users) with having reasonably up-to-date software. This will apply to all programs, libraries and modules (Perl/Python/...) in /opt/ts on the Solaris servers.

I would propose the following schedule:

* New installs will be done on demand * Minor upgrades (e.g. 1.0.0 to 1.0.1) will be done each month * Major upgrade (e.g. 1.0.0 to 1.1.0 or 1.2.0), which might require changes from users, will be done quarterly, in January, April, July and October.

In addition, when we upgrade a shared library (e.g. libjpeg.so.7 -> libjpeg.so.8), or a large application like Python (2.x -> 2.y), if possible, we will leave the old version installed for one maintenance cycle (3 months) to give users time to fix or recompile local software.

Please comment if you think this won't work for you, or if you have a better idea.

- river.