Introducing our new blog team

[Carsten Agger]

Speaking of introducing the new blog team, the blogs seem to be down?

Best
Carsten

Den 19-05-2016 kl. 21:37 skrev Daniel Pocock:
>
> On 19/05/16 21:25, Florian Snow wrote:
>
>>> Debian has only had a major upgrade once every two years.
>> That's not what I mean;  I mean regular updates.  They should not
>> break anything in Debian, I understand that.  My point is just that we
>> may have to use a Wordpress plugin (for example for LDAP) that may or
>> may not play nice with all versions of Wordpress.  In an ideal world,
>> we would just not use such a plugin, but in reality, we may need it to
>> provide the service we want to provide.
>>
>> In the past, the system hackers installed upgrades, and, I presume,
>> had to check if the blog was still running.  We want to reduce the
>> workload of the admins here by having a separate team take care of
>> anything service (e.g. blog) related.  The sysadmins should be able to
>> install an OS update without having to check the blog specifically.
>>
> One way to deal with this is to package the plugin for Debian too, I've
> done that for various Drupal modules.  Then the packages are being used
> and tested by more people.
>
> It also means you can install the packages on a test server with minimal
> effort and evaluate upgrades before doing the upgrade on a real server.
>
>
>>> I would hope the system-hackers group would coordinate the date of
>>> any major OS upgrade with you.
>> I would hope so for a switch from Jessie to Stretch for example.  For
>> regular updates, I think no such interaction should be required.  Now,
>> the problem I was talking about is that by using a non-packaged
>> version of Wordpress, we decouple things a bit.
>>
>> The scenario with using the packaged version could look like this:  A
>> sysadmin installs updates and one of those is for Wordpress.  This
>> update breaks LDAP authentication and possibly even brings down the
>> whole Wordpress instance.  That means the blog hackers have to act
>> immediately to fix the issue, at a time that may be inconvenient.
>>
> You could use dpkg to put a hold on the Wordpress package version, but
> then you wouldn't get the security updates.
>
>> The scenario with upstream Wordpress could look like this:  A sysadmin
>> installs updates and Wordpress is not affected.  Wordpress tries to do
>> an automatic update and cannot do it because of the LDAP plugin.  That
>> means the blog hackers still need to act soon, but they can start when
>> it is more convenient and when they have more time to actually track
>> down and fix the problem.
>>
>>
>>> As packaged systems are very standard, you should be able to easily
>>> replicate the server in a test environment and do a trial run of the
>>> upgrade and test any plugins before upgrading the real server.
>> I agree this would be ideal.  I am afraid that we don't have the
>> manpower for such a setup, though.
>>
> A test server doesn't have to be a fully public hosted server, it could
> even be your own laptop or home PC with apache and wordpress packages
> installed
>
> When you use packaged software you also benefit from the testing that
> other people do on their systems.
>
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