Ok, we have a new image, how do we push it?

• How do we convince our admins on call for google.com that we're not going to kill services by pushing the update?

• The new image was created with a distro 10 years newer, and packages that do not even contain the same binaries.

• Just upgrading coreutils from v4 to v7 is very scary since GNU willfully broke backward compatibility to make Posix happy.

• Doing a file by file compare across 20K+ files is not practical.

• Ultimately, no way to guarantee that we can just switch distributions and it'll work.

• Hard to convince our internal users to run production services on a very different distro, and even find beta testers.