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Re: [JunkMail] OpenLDAP upgrade cycle



Matthew J. Smith wrote:

I have noticed, in my short time on this list, that the upgrade cycle
for OpenLDAP seems to be very short. I initially installed 2.2.6,
because that is the only RPM available for my SuSE distro. Then, on
advice from this list, I compiled my own 2.2.15. Shortly after, 2.2.17
was released, and now 2.2.19 is available. So, a few questions:


Technically speaking, each increment in x.x.Z is a bug fix release, not an "upgrade" - i.e., most people refer to "upgrades" as new feature sets. OpenLDAP 2.2 has been feature-frozen for quite a while. We don't spin these releases for the fun of it, we release them because there are problems that need to be corrected.

* Are most of you scheduling frequent maintenance windows to stay
current?
* Is there a version of the OpenLDAP 2.x series that is "stable enough"
and secure, perhaps at the expense of new features, that I can rely on,
without having to upgrade for a while?


I suppose, unless there is a security patch in a particular release, you're alway safe to keep using whichever version currently works for you. That is, don't upgrade unless you know you've been hit by a particular problem that one of the newer releases fixes. And when OpenLDAP 2.3 comes out, which *is* a new-feature release, you should feel comfortable sticking with 2.2.x for a while. On the flip side, there's been some reorganizing in the 2.3 code layout that makes it inherently more stable, pushing more features out of the core and into isolated modules. This lets us continue to develop new features without impacting core stability, because the new features don't touch the main code path unless you explicitly configure them for use.

* When I do need to upgrade, can I do "rolling upgrades" (upgrade one
instance at a time), or do all instances in my (SyncRepl) replication
grid need to be upgraded at the same time?


I don't see any problem with doing staged deployments within a release series. I expect you'll be able to do a rolling upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 as well.

Thanks all,
-Matt


--
 -- Howard Chu
 Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
 http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
 Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support