Patches: Pull or Push ?
Most people prefer to disagree with the masses on whether they like sunny side up or scrambled eggs. And the form of getting patches is no different. If you ask an IT administrator (which is the person applying patches in most corporate organizations) they will tell you horror stories of how patches can go wrong and would be happy to give you examples of why every patch needs to be individually tested before deploying. But my dad, for example, doesn't care about patches, and while he won't go out of the way to install a patch, he may be ok with patches being pushed to him automatically. This debate reminds me of another interesting debate in the Web-Operations world about " continuous deployment ". In that case the debate was whether applications should be deployed in scheduled releases (for example every quarter) or whether it should be released as things gets developed and pushed. If you think about this a little more it would be very clear that the developers