I'd tend to agree, with one exception: it's sometimes even more desirable to construct own /usr/local version of some critical packages (database, languages, cr

I'd tend to agree, with one exception: it's sometimes even more desirable to construct own /usr/local version of some critical packages (database, languages, crucial libs) instead of distro versions; then recreate this on your all production nodes and never upgrade it without a carefully thought reason and pre-prod test. Two main reasons for this: - sometimes the version provided by the distro doesn't have set of features which you need and careful admin can provide it for you, - sometimes distro packagers or upstream folks violate semantic versioning (incidentally or not) and upon upgrade from distro, some of your sub-features ("sub-" doesn't have to mean "not critical") break. Of course you lose the google-fu you've mentioned, but to be honest, many production environments are so distinct that there's no sane way to compare one to "typical Debian X.Y server". I personally find FreeBSD approach very convenient wrt to the issues above, because ports evolve independently from the base system; but YMMV.