Ok, we have a new image, how do we push it? (2)

Do we end up rolling a very different distro over a month, or over a year and end up with a non uniform setup in production for that long? That's not going to make debugging easy...
Does it mean we have to maintain 2 totally different distributions mostly in sync for that long?
OMG, and one is made with RPMs, while the other one is dpkg, using totally different build rules and inter package dependencies.
Argh!

Do we end up rolling a very different distro over a month, or over a year and end up with a non uniform setup in production for that long? That's not going to make debugging easy...