[TriLUG] Debian Sid/Unstable

[Kevin Hunter Kesling]

At 12:03pm -0500 Fri, 28 Feb 2014, Alan Porter wrote:
> At 11:25am -0500 Fri, 28 Feb 2014, Sean Alexandre wrote:
>> On (2): Debian also seems to do a good job of patching security
>> holes when fixes become available. It would be harder to do this if
>> the hole had to be patched in multiple places.

> My Mac did something very similar after this week's OS update, which
> I assume had the same SSL fix.
>
> My guess was that it included a script that scanned the entire
> filesystem, looking for multiple copies of the faulty SSL libraries
> and replacing or patching them. I should have done a comparison of
> the day before's backups against the day-after's backups.
>
> A Debian system would not need to do this, because all of the
> packages rely on separately-installed libraries that bind at
> run-time.

This is also a stronger argument to me, and perhaps getting at the piece 
I'm missing here.  I suppose the question then, is where to draw the 
line between system-provided ABI, and application specific libraries?

Clearly, the Linux line is larger than OS X's, and is the quicker one 
for fixing system-effecting issues such as your example.  (With the 
caveat, of course, that upgrading packages -- as opposed to correcting 
bugs/security issues -- means updating your entire distro.)

One pays their money and makes their choices, I suppose: it's hard to 
argue with "It works!", and thanks for joining me on my idle musings.

Cheers,

Kevin