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If I had been woken up in the middle of the night or had a vacation interrupted on account of this, I would not be entertaining warm and grateful thoughts towar

If I had been woken up in the middle of the night or had a vacation interrupted on account of this, I would not be entertaining warm and grateful thoughts toward whoever thought it was a good idea.

ziml77 4y ago
Wouldn't you test before upgrading packages in production? And usually you'd want to schedule any upgrades so that the next day or two has coverage from someone who can deal with any issues that arise.
- 0x0 4y ago
  What if a cron.monthly or cron.weekly script calls egrep? Congrats now you get a lot of noise from cron stderr emails in the distant future.
- bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
  I have yet to work at a place that didn’t have systems running mission-critical shell scripts with little to no SDLC on boxes that got periodic “yum update -y”s. There seems to be a difference in oversight of software we write & “the operating system”. Should we do better? Absolutely! Will this burn people if vendors don’t take care? Also absolutely!
guhidalg 4y ago
I don't know if I have sympathy for this argument. Your script ostensibly handles (at least logs) errors and warnings right? Do you exhaustively handle every single error and warning in a unique and different way or do you have a catchall "If non-0 return code then fail"? How does introducing new output to stderr affect that?
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
If you're being woken in the middle of the night over this then your testing infrastructure is crap. This is something that should be caught before it gets to that point SPECIFICALLY so you aren't getting woken up in the middle of the night.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  All the replies so far are missing the point: it is prudent to monitor for unusual events, including previously-unseen messages, over and above the explicit handling of specific errors. It is also prudent to not wait until morning to investigate. Your infrastructure probably is crap, as very few people get to build it themselves from scratch. That does not mean one should cheerfully accept additional unnecessary or pedantic complications. It would also be prudent to investigate each and every change to any of the software you use, in order to anticipate problems, but unnecessary and pedantic changes increase the burden there, as well.

If I had been woken up in the middle of the night or had a vacation interrupted on account of this, I would not be entertaining warm and grateful thoughts toward whoever thought it was a good idea.

ziml77 4y ago

Wouldn't you test before upgrading packages in production? And usually you'd want to schedule any upgrades so that the next day or two has coverage from someone who can deal with any issues that arise.

0x0 4y ago
What if a cron.monthly or cron.weekly script calls egrep? Congrats now you get a lot of noise from cron stderr emails in the distant future.
bad416f1f5a2 4y ago
I have yet to work at a place that didn’t have systems running mission-critical shell scripts with little to no SDLC on boxes that got periodic “yum update -y”s. There seems to be a difference in oversight of software we write & “the operating system”. Should we do better? Absolutely! Will this burn people if vendors don’t take care? Also absolutely!

guhidalg 4y ago

I don't know if I have sympathy for this argument. Your script ostensibly handles (at least logs) errors and warnings right? Do you exhaustively handle every single error and warning in a unique and different way or do you have a catchall "If non-0 return code then fail"? How does introducing new output to stderr affect that?

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

If you're being woken in the middle of the night over this then your testing infrastructure is crap. This is something that should be caught before it gets to that point SPECIFICALLY so you aren't getting woken up in the middle of the night.

mannykannot 4y ago
All the replies so far are missing the point: it is prudent to monitor for unusual events, including previously-unseen messages, over and above the explicit handling of specific errors. It is also prudent to not wait until morning to investigate. Your infrastructure probably is crap, as very few people get to build it themselves from scratch. That does not mean one should cheerfully accept additional unnecessary or pedantic complications. It would also be prudent to investigate each and every change to any of the software you use, in order to anticipate problems, but unnecessary and pedantic changes increase the burden there, as well.