# NanoBSD updating policy



## Phishfry (Jun 24, 2018)

I volunteered to help someone with a project and I am struggling to come up with a solid policy on updates to NanoBSD.
Because it is an Read-Only disk arrangement normal updating procedures do not apply.
New images must be crafted for each update.

I recommended every 6 months and no more than yearly. They are leaning to yearly.
We have contingency plans for anything real foul comes along.
But I started to think -instead of a calendar date maybe we should just worry about tracking -RELEASE 's and do emergency build for anything tragic that needs patching. That is more or less the way I use it now. Sometimes I have skipped point releases though.

Thoughts?
NanoBSD will be the OS for an embedded commercial appliance.


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## Phishfry (Jul 1, 2018)

OK you have a satellite in space with NanoBSD. You need to devise an update plan.
Those pesky space hackers mean you must update your satellite OS every so often.
Space comms are slow so you must balance science versus security.
What is a reasonable update frequency on deeply embedded systems.


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## Deleted member 54719 (Jul 2, 2018)

Do you make the assumption that there will always be SOME persistent storage available?  If so, then use it for hot patches, and roll those fixes into releases on a regular schedule.   This can be done "simply" by giving the persistent storage a high priority in the PATH search.  Does it cover everything? No, but it takes care of situations where an exe needs to be upgraded and cannot on the ramdisk without a full flash update.


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