bcfg2

[Ask Bjørn Hansen]

On Dec 21, 2006, at 7:37, seth vidal wrote:

> If we start tying down ruby or any other language as we move along we
> end up having more and more pieces of the OS that we cannot deploy new
> versions of w/o fear of breaking our administrative infrastructure.

I'm sorry, that's just FUD.

Generally: There are lots of components that, if you were truly  
paranoid, you couldn't upgrade without fear of breaking any sort of  
mildly complex infrastructure anyway.  Yet most of us go along  
alright with frequent-ish "yum upgrade" or (of course) "up2date -u".

More specifically: I don't know the change history of python well,  
but with for instance perl then any sort of breakage is extremely  
rare.   Maybe I have selective memory, but I don't recall any  
actually.  You should see the lengths they go to to preserve obscure  
side-effects of bugs and undocumented "features" as they still  
rapidly are developing and enhancing perl 5.

I've only been using Ruby casually for a few years, but I haven't  
gotten the impression that it's much different in the Ruby community.

As someone else pointed out: It's really not reasonable to say "oh,  
we don't trust we won't break our own packages so let's not use  
them".  Dog food and all.   In particular not if the worst case  
scenario is to login to each box manually to downgrade a bad RPM to  
get the administration infrastructure going again.

Your other argument: "Few here programs in Ruby and critically  
depending on something we can't fix sucks" is much much better.   :-)

As a, future, counter argument then the stateless guys are planning  
to use puppet as a part of that system.  If so then there's a good  
chance it'll be very well integrated with Fedora and RHEL.



  - ask

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