[PLUG] LAMP Platform Updating Problems

Jennifer Redman jenred at gmail.com
Wed May 30 20:58:26 UTC 2007


Hi Ken,

This can be one of the frustrating aspects of using Open Source software in
production.  Disparate development teams don't have to make sure everything
works with everything (which would be impossible) and sometimes upgrades
break seemingly unrelated pieces of software.

However, some distros  come pretty close to solving this issue -- by
offering "stable"  package collections.  Everything is tested and works
together.  Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, Centos, and Suse follow this practice.  You
lose some of the flexibility of running Gentoo -- but at least applications
"should" continue to work together without feature loss, when recommended
updates are rolled out.

Another option is to make sure you test all upgrades including patches on a
staging environment first -- and closely review whether or not you "really"
need the patch and at the same time review all the potential dependencies,
and then fix all the problems before rolling to production -- can take a lot
of time though.

Jen

On 5/30/07, Kenneth B. Hill <KEN at scottshill.com> wrote:
>
> I have a been leading a development project of a database app that is
> built on a LAMP-variant platform (it uses Gentoo Linux, Apache,
> PostgreSQL AND PHP) along with some CPAN perl modules and MapServer.
> We seem to have problems with updates to the individual LAMP tools
> not working with the other LAMP tools. For example, if we update
> Apache with a security update, then we experience with features in
> the app not working in a perl mod or PHP etc.
>
> I recently got back from a business trip, and I sat next to someone
> on the airplane that does LAMP database application development. I
> shared with him this experience, and he agreed with me that this is
> an underlying problem with developing in a LAMP environment/platform.
> This results in increasing our labor/time costs in maintaining the
> infrastructure of the application. I would like to hear other
> experiences with this issue - if any.
>
> -Ken
> _______________________________________________
> PLUG mailing list
> PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
>



More information about the PLUG mailing list