[SlugLUG] Upstream trust and 50000 machines

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ignacio Solis (isolis at igso.net):

> Who do you trust?
> 
> The programmers? of the kernel? of the patches? of the libs? of the software?
> The compilers?
> The cpu designers?
> 
> At some point you have to place trust somewhere.

Yes, you do indeed.

> A lot of those people have earned their place in a society. Debian users don't
> "blindly" follow the kernel maintainers (or any other maintainer for that
> matter), since that person has earned his place. It's not like some random
> person off the street started compiling the kernel for Debian.

I concur, and (with minor exceptions) tend to act accordingly.

At one firm, all several-hundred workstations were configured with
cronjobs that made them pull down via rsync new deployed files nightly
from a "golden master" prototype workstation.  This was something of a
design compromise that allowed the firm, where necessary, to override
Debian package defaults, and one of the areas we did this was NFS code
(because we had H.J. Liu and David Higgin on payroll working on NFS, so 
our stuff really _was_ better than stock).  But for the most part, we
used appropriately selected distro packages.