X11 and WinKey [was Re: Updating to xorg-x11 packages?]

[Mike A. Harris]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2004, Felipe Alfaro Solana wrote:

>Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 09:14:31 +0100
>From: Felipe Alfaro Solana <felipe_alfaro at linuxmail.org>
>To: Development discussions related to Fedora Core
>    <fedora-devel-list at redhat.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain
>Reply-To: Development discussions related to Fedora Core
>    <fedora-devel-list at redhat.com>
>X-BeenThere: fedora-devel-list at redhat.com
>Subject: X11 and WinKey [was Re: Updating to xorg-x11 packages?]
>
>On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 07:42, Eric Hattemer wrote:
>
>> Another fun 'growing pain' is that /usr/X11R6/lib magically disapears 
>> from /etc/ld.so.conf.  That was a fun one to figure out. 
>
>It's fixed in latest xorg-x11 packages:

s/fixed/attempted to fix/.....   the problem is still present.  
2 people have suggested using rpm triggers to solve this problem.  
Triggers are a risky business on their own however which can end 
up creating problems days/weeks/months down the road that are 
completely impossible to cleanly fix.  Not that a trigger can't 
be done correctly the first time and not have any problems, but 
rather that experience of my own, and that of others has shown 
that triggers are very tricky and statistically are not bug free 
the first time around, leading to bigger problems that only 
manifest in future upgrades, and aren't bypassable automatically.

As such, I'd like to avoid adding triggers at all costs.

Altogether, this leaves 3 alternate scenarios that I can 
think of:

1) Let anaconda or something else fix it during the OS 
   upgrade cycle, via voodoo magic.

2) Use rpm triggers with no guarantee of it actually fixing it, 
   and no way to 100% predict the future, along with all of the 
   associated risks of using triggers.

Downside to #1 is that users upgrading manually using rpm -Uvh, 
or via up2date, yum, apt will have a one time growing pain during 
the transition from XFree86 to xorg-x11.  Solution #1 is what we 
probably would have done in any previous OS release to play 
things safe.

Downside to #2 is the risks involved with triggers, that have 
shown again and again repeatedly in almost every rpm package that 
has ever used them, that triggers are very hard to get right, and 
to predict all the possible ways the script might get called in 
the future.  They're notoriously hard to test in advance also, 
but once they're out in the wild, if a bug is found, then users 
are essentially screwed until they've upgraded at least 2 times.

Again, I'm very hesitant to use rpm triggers, but at this point
nothing is ruled out yet.  I'm open to suggestions.


-- 
Mike A. Harris       ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - X.org X11 maintainer - Red Hat