I'll agree to some extent about the consistency, but I don't think that the "fork and go" mentality makes stability any worse.
I mean, as it is, I see segfaults and whatnot regularly in the canonical, distro-released versions of Apache. Major software releases all the time with bugs that could potentially be a show-stopper. My experience hasn't shown this to be any worse with non-canonical sources. Sometimes it's better.
Further, I like to think of the sysadmin's job as fostering business continuity. While uptime is a primary indicator of this, I think it's lower in priority than say, losing a crapload of customer data. If I have to shut a site down for an hour to prevent losing all transactions for the previous 24 hours or something, then it's not a terribly difficult choice. (Having to make this choice at all, of course, means you should be engineering something better. But we don't have the luxury of infinite time.)
And having all the uptime in the world won't help you if your engineers can't do their jobs effectively because the tools you give them are insufficient. Sometimes the best option is to suck it up and try that patch.
It's a delicate balancing act, and I'm not by any means advocating running all your software out of unofficial repos. Sometimes you gotta make that call, though. And if I'm looking at github at all, it's probably because a package doesn't already exist, or because I need a fix for one specific bug.
I mean, as it is, I see segfaults and whatnot regularly in the canonical, distro-released versions of Apache. Major software releases all the time with bugs that could potentially be a show-stopper. My experience hasn't shown this to be any worse with non-canonical sources. Sometimes it's better.
Further, I like to think of the sysadmin's job as fostering business continuity. While uptime is a primary indicator of this, I think it's lower in priority than say, losing a crapload of customer data. If I have to shut a site down for an hour to prevent losing all transactions for the previous 24 hours or something, then it's not a terribly difficult choice. (Having to make this choice at all, of course, means you should be engineering something better. But we don't have the luxury of infinite time.)
And having all the uptime in the world won't help you if your engineers can't do their jobs effectively because the tools you give them are insufficient. Sometimes the best option is to suck it up and try that patch.
It's a delicate balancing act, and I'm not by any means advocating running all your software out of unofficial repos. Sometimes you gotta make that call, though. And if I'm looking at github at all, it's probably because a package doesn't already exist, or because I need a fix for one specific bug.