[c-nsp] IOS XR 4.3.0 or 4.3.1

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Thu, 23 May 2013, Jared Mauch wrote:

> That seems to be what the SE in the (now trimmed reference) was 
> suggesting.  I understand not everyone has lab/test hardware, but if 
> that's the case how can you ever upgrade anything without risk.  At some 
> point you need to make that jump.

I'd say the acceptable risk is different for each ISP.

> I think the question of what that unit of measure you apply.  If you 
> want to wait until X bugs are fixed, I can certainly understand where 
> x(sub)1 for my network may not be the same as x(sub)2 for yours.  Is 
> there a specific metric for number of defects you use, or is it just 
> some time-based SWAG?  Without the vendor getting feedback that their 
> software is good (or bad), they are left with an unknown outcome for 
> their software release.

I'm not saying everybody should do what I say. In a perfect world vendors 
would test there code properly and there would be no bugs. This is 
obviously not happening so by staying behind the curve you let others run 
into the bugs, they are fixed and by waiting you benefit from this. 
Others might say new features are extremely important to them and they 
don't mind rebooting their core boxes every 3 months to apply fixes.

> I'm can get very frustrated with Cisco on these topics.  We went a round 
> with them on 4.2.2 as we depended on that release for specific hardware. 
> They didn't want to support it.  If that's the case, there was no point 
> of the release at all, why even ship that release?  (can you feel my 
> frustration? :-)

Absolutely. I also feel that at least the ASR9k BU seems to want to 
abandon their "long-term" software after a year and stop supporting it. 
This is not what I have been used to before on other platforms.

But at least there is hope that things are improving with 4.3 and later 
releases.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se