openSUSE admin

As usual, we keep our infrastructure up-to-date. While this is easy for the base system ('zypper patch', you know? ;-) most of the applications need special handling. Normally, we package them as well in our OBS repositories. But this often means that we need to maintain them on our own. At least: packaging them allows us to track them easily and integrates them in the normal workflow. All we have to do to keep them updated on the production machines is a 'zypper up' (which updates all packages with higher version and/or release number - while a 'zypper patch' only updates packages, which have an official patchinfo with them).

Upgrading Matomo from version 3.14.1 to 4.1.1 was not that easy: simply replacing the files in the package was not enough. Upstream changed so much in the database structure, that the standard calls in the post installation script (which normally update the database as well during package update) were just not enough. As this is (hopefully) a one-time effort, we run some steps manually from the commandline, which took ~20hours. After that, our DB was updated, cleaned up and ready to go again.

Summary: Being an openSUSE hero includes not only being an infrastructure Guru with automation and scripting skills. Often enough, you need some packaging expertise as well. ...and sometimes even this is not enough!