Shock horror

[Francesco Cesarini]

Vlad wrote:

> One should have then to keep track of what was delivered where, and it 
> is difficult in the long run even for such hard constrained 
> environments as Ericsson's.


It is difficult, but it has to be done. If you have hundreds of systems 
installed worldwide, with maybe 5 versions available and 10 patch 
packages for each version, knowing *Exactly* what module versions, what 
patches, what application versions and release revisions is 
indispensable, as you need to recreate the exact environmentso as to 
know what code to debug and *hopefully* be able to reproduce the problem 
in a controlled environment. There are cases where we spent days chasing 
problems which in the end appeared to be undocumented hand installed 
patches by some overambitious engineer who did not know what he was doing. 

> Also, what if an operator might be allowed to access the Erlang shell 
> - he/she wouldn't have access to the absent functionality.

I am ready to debate if we even should give access to the Erlang shell 
to first and second line support. A few years ago, I never  believed I 
would say such a thing, but with literaly thousands of heavy duty Erlang 
systems running out there today, if you are to stand any chance of 
giving decent support and efficiently finding bugs giving operators an 
Erlang shell would not facilitete your task as you can not control or 
monitor what they have done..

Regards,
Francsesco
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http://www.erlang-consulting.com