FreeBSD flood of 8 breakage announcements in 3 mins.

Julian H. Stacey jhs at berklix.com
Wed May 15 15:44:48 UTC 2019


Hi, Reference:
> From:		Alan Somers <asomers at freebsd.org>
> Date:		Wed, 15 May 2019 08:32:26 -0600

Alan Somers wrote:
> On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 8:26 AM Julian H. Stacey <jhs at berklix.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi core@,
> > cc hackers@ & stable@
> >
> > PR headline : "FreeBSD flood of 8 breakage announcements in 3 mins."
> >
> > https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2019-May/date.html
> >
> > Volunteers who contribute actual fixes are very much appreciated;
> > But those styled as 'management' who delay announcements to batch floods
> > damage us. As they've previously refused to stop, it's time to sack them.
> >
> > Just send each announcement out when ready, no delays to batch them.
> > No sys admins can deal with 8 in 3 mins:
> >   Especially on multiple systems & releases.  Recipients start
> >   mitigating, then more flood in, & need review which are
> >   most urgent to interrupt to;  While also avoiding sudden upgrades
> >   to many servers & releases, to minimise disturbing server users,
> >   bosses & customers.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Julian
> > --
> > Julian Stacey, Consultant Systems Engineer, BSD Linux Unix, Munich Aachen Kent
> >  http://stolenvotes.uk  Brexit ref. stole votes from 700,000 Brits in EU.
> >  Lies bought; Groups fined; 1.9 M young had no vote, 1.3 M old leavers died.
> 
> I disagree, Julian.  I think SAs are easier to deal with when they're
> batched.  True, I can't fix the first one in less than 3 minutes.  But
> then I probably wouldn't even notice it that fast.  Batching them all
> together means fewer updates and reboots.

Batching also means some of these vulnerabilities could have been 
fixed earlier & less of a surge of demand on recipient admins time.

An admin can find time to ameliorate 1 bug, not 8 suddenly together.
Avoidance is called planning ahead. Giving warning of a workload.
Like an admin plans ahead & announces an outage schedule for planned upgrade.

Suddenly dumping 8 on admins causes overload on admin manpower.
8 reason for users to approach admin in parallel & say
"FreeBSD seems riddled, how long will all the sudden unplanned
 outages take ?  Should we just dump it ?"
Dont want negative PR & lack of management.

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, Consultant Systems Engineer, BSD Linux Unix, Munich Aachen Kent
 http://stolenvotes.uk  Brexit ref. stole votes from 700,000 Brits in EU.
 Lies bought; Groups fined; 1.9 M young had no vote, 1.3 M old leavers died.


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