Problem: Life happens, and bugs exist post-release of a product, including an appliance, causing problems indefinitely which can only (traditionally) be fixed by re-releasing the product's installer, which is very painful politically if not technically.

Presumably a future version of Filr (4.x?) will be based on SLES 12, if only because SLES 11 has probably reached its final SP. SLES 12 has the ability to pull down updates to the installer before doing the main installation, which could help with issues found after the product is released. This is built-in functionality with SLES 12, and would probably just require putting the updated RPMs in a repository that is accessible by clients at install time which has the fixes that came after the product shipped: https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles-12/book_sle_deployment/data/sec_i_yast2_self_update.html

The net result of updates happening before the install fully runs is that all known issues can be patched before the install takes place, before headaches are experienced with a new install, and in particular helping the first-use experience for new users who will remember the experience for a long time, possibly even discouraging the first use if the bug is bad enough.

Comments

  • Noted Aaron.

    You are right - Filr 4.0 will be build on top of SLES 12

  • At this point might it be better to base it on SLES 15?

  • Aaron,

    Though we are investigating this - we mostly won't be ready to move to SLES15 in Filr 4.0