On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 12:57 AM, Cliff Pratt enkiduonthenet@gmail.com wrote:
I have some sympathy for Michael. There are organisations which are so paranoid that they will not allow updates between eg 6.4 and 6.5, either because they insist on rigorous (ie lengthy and time consuming) regression testing of applications or because a third party package vendor specifies a particular level of OS for their product (I can think of at least two).
Who has not been caught in the "not supported here" trap? You install a package from the OS supplier, and have an issue with it. You go to the forum for the package and get the response "upgrade to the latest release", but the OS supplier will not support the OS if you upgrade the package to the latest release!
A strict requirement based on arbitrary version numbers may be foolish, but a requirement for thorough testing before any change to a production environment is not - even though the changes that happen through the minor releases of an 'enterprise' OS have already been vetted for changes to existing APIs. However, you really have to assume that whatever you are running has security flaws and you have to be prepared to roll out the fixes as soon as possible after they are released since at that point the vulnerabilities will be well known. So, you need a fairly agile testing/deployment process to match your policy and keep it from doing more harm than good.