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Fedora Introduces Offline Updates
itwbennett writes "Thanks to a new feature approved this week by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee, you won't hear Fedora 18 users bragging about systems that have been running continuously for months on end. 'Fedora's new Offline System Update feature will change the current system to something that is more Windows- and OS X-like: while many updates can still be made on the fly, certain package updates will require the system to be restarted so the patches can be applied in a special mode, according to the Fedora wiki page on the feature,' writes blogger Brian Proffitt."
Good grief, the Stupid coming from Fedora and the GNOMEs is making my head hurt. We managed to update running systems with package management for how long? Leave it to the GNOMEs to fudge things up.... or just have Mac/Windows envy and convince themselves that this isn't a bug, it is a feature!
I'm sorry, but there is not one bit of POSIX or UNIX or Linux or Gnome or GNU or Open Source, etc. design that deals with explaining system behavior after replacing arbitrary parts of the library search path, or in general, any filesystem resources at runtime. There is nothing special happening in Linux in this regard, no magic, your emperor has no clothes.
You Linux guys have been burying your head in the sand this whole time. I sat through it while Windows locked files that were in use and you all made fun of it, Solaris recommended booting into single user mode to apply updates, and you mocked that. They improved greatly over the years, gaining convenience while maintaining system integrity at runtime. OS X, Windows, and Solaris either lock files in use, apply system updates from a special environment, snap shot a running system root, or some combination of those. Linux systems just skate by doing NOTHING, maybe an individual update will restart the service it is responsible for (MySQL RPM) maybe it wont (httpd RPM).
A god damned teenager with weeks of Unix experience can even come up with "If you only have to reboot to update your kernel, how do you patch your C runtime? Hey... what about other libraries?" It scares me that most people posting on this page have absolutely no clue how ghetto the operations behind a 'yum update' are, and many of you sadly, are professional Unix system admins. Some of you even taught yourselves not to apply system patches from a GUI tool, and you still just don't get it, you never stopped to think WHY, what was the problem, and how could that be FIXED.
It truly is scary, the lack of engineering discipline displayed by people who call themselves "geeks". Step one is admit you have a problem. Step three is do what these Fedora guys tell you to, they have a clue, you mentally lazy bastards.
- Angry in IT Ops