Standard Procedures for all Operating System Updates

We'll document some standard procedures, mostly just reminders, for some of the things we do when planning for and executing an operating system update. E.g. updating the version of Ubuntu on linux.student.cs.

Software Changes

When we do an OS update, we will document and announce what software will be explicitly added or removed from the system, and in particular, from the default search rules. So that means XHier packages, and Ubuntu packages, and anything else we manually add to the system (e.g. in /usr/local/).

In theory it would be good to do that for all changes caused by the change in the base OS itself, however that list is in practice too large to deal with. So we make our best effort to discover and document relevant differences.