I have a web application running on Zope on Debian GNU/Linux. Debian has excellent package management, with the facility to give a simple
apt-get update
on the command line to update all of the software on the system (this being Free software, the Debian project can package lots of application level software along with the core "operating system", which makes managing the software you have installed much easier and cleaner than it is in Windows).
So far, so good. Debian also has three versions available at any one time: stable, testing, and unstable. Stable is the officially released version, but Debian's release cycle is slow, so a lot of people run testing, which is supposed to be a mostly working install (unstable can be hideously broken). Which it almost invariably is.
Unfortunately, these two features -- easy as pie installed software management and the ability to choose to use the testing distribution -- means the command above will upgrade everything which has changed in the testing distribution when you give it. Which, when you are running production servers, is Wrong with a capital Wuh.
Fortunately for me, on this occasion the software in question was Zope, and it popped up a configuration screen before going ahead with the installation. Not every package does. If it hadn't, I'd have been screwed.
Moral of the story? Wake up, you daft bugger, and think about what you're doing on a production machine.
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