Right, well, as per the mysql installation documentation, I dutifully signed up for the mysql@lists.mysql.com mailing list supposedly to keep on top of the news about bugs, security alerts, patches, fixes, etc for mysql.

Well that lasted 15 minutes. Now I remember why I don't subscribe to mailing lists - avalanche!!!

So how then - oh mighty linux sysadmin gurus - should someone, without enough time to read six billion emails a day, keep on top of such matters for the common LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL/PostgreSQL, PHP/Perl)? :confused: Tips? Suggestions? Resources?

<rant>
To be honest, I've come to really hate mailing lists. Even when they are batched, they are pointless. For heaven's sake, throw up a forum, preferably vBull and not some crappy version 0.3 of phpbb. Sorry, doesn't have anything to do with the post, just a random blurb.
</rant>

Osmosis? :erm:

grep is your friend.

The most important things, for example, to know about are security notifications. So write a script to grep your incoming mail for the string "ecurity" and send those somewhere special (say, to your pager). Even better, subscribe to general security mailing lists (eg bugtraq) and grep for the names of the products you're using.

But you should also remember that you don't always need to know about everything. A patch which improves performance by 0.01% really isn't going to be worth applying; nor is a patch to add an obscure feature you're not going to use. Subscribe to the appropriate mailing lists (-security and -announce, generally) and leave the rest to active developers.

Also consider using usenet. You can use tools like deja to search for the information you are looking for, and it appears that MySQL mirrors their lists in a newsgroup format.

Specifically look for:

gated.mysql.misc
mailing.database.mysql.*

That should get you started.

Great idea - thanks, that's much appreciated. Of course, deja is now groups.google.com