For a Linux mailing list, it does seem very Debian-focussed here, with a little Fedora and Ubuntu. No-one has even mentioned CoreOS <https://coreos.com> or Ubuntu Snappy <https://developer.ubuntu.com/en/snappy/> here at all. If you haven't heard of those, it's worth having a look. They're both more focussed on server deployments, but they're switching around how packages and the OS are maintained. In both systems, the OS is stripped down, and comes as a single package, but is simple to update. (And in Snappy's case, also easy to rollback) Apps and libraries are rolled up into bigger chunks as well, removing dependencies mostly. CoreOS uses Docker images for everything; Snappy seems to use some of their own combination of cgroups+lxc+apparmor for separation, with mostly-statically-compiled apps. (Snappy says that developers can choose to statically link libraries, or they can choose to use system-installed versions of some "frameworks") Both these systems are interesting in the way they've decided to remove fine-grained packaging and updates. Having seen issues arise from version conflicts before, or just simply been fed up with having dozens of small updates a day, I can understand some of this motivation. I'm sure we've all been there before, when one package really, really wants a new version of an underlying library, but updating that library then requires updating other packages that maybe we'd have rather left alone.. Or consider that it solves another problem - you just want to try and have identical servers, but with conventional systems, by the time you finish running apt-get updates on a hundred of them sequentially, some of the packages will have been upgraded between when you started and finished.* With CoreOS or Snappy, it's much easier to just say "I have version 123 of the OS installed." You can test some servers with version +1 and then when they are good, you can push that specific version out to everything else. (Note: Disk space is cheap now, and the modern kernels deduplicate memory pages; so statically linking stuff in doesn't hurt storage or memory.) Anyway.. thought I'd mention these here since no-one else has been :) -Toby * Yes, using a deb cache or mirror alleviates this problem, until your servers are in separate data centres with independent caches or mirrors...