Patching theory and strategies
One might think that patching is pretty straightforward, and that there would be little to discuss. This is not the case. In fact, if you talk to several system administrators you are bound to get some pretty widely varying opinions. Some people patch daily, some weekly, some wait as long as they can, some do so only haphazardly, and some believe that you should never patch at all (hey, it if isn't broke, don't fix it!)
We should first establish why we patch our software. Patching, as opposed to updating or upgrading, implies that we are applying minor fixes to software to fix a known problem or bug but not to implement new features or functionality. Adding new features is generally considered to be an update.
Most software vendors and operating system vendors honor this system and maintain patching systems that only address security or stability issues in their software between releases. In the Linux ecosystem this is primarily tied...
