What Fedora makes sucking for me - or why I am NOT Fedora

[Seth Vidal]

On Sun, 14 Dec 2008, Robert Scheck wrote:

> Hello Till,
>
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, Till Maas wrote:
>> I agree here. I already mentioned some methods in another e-mail. Another
>> possibility I just thought of would be to create reverse delta rpms, i.e.
>> before an rpm is installed, a delta to the current state is created and stored
>> somewhere. This can then used to restore the previous state. Of course someone
>> needs to write this. :-)
>
> Shrug. Who will be the lucky guy doing this? IMHO delta rpms are making the
> handling of packages just more complicated, even they e.g. save traffic.
> Oh, did already implement somebody the downgrading once the last update
> using a delta rpm was broken? That's a thing, e.g. openSUSE is AFAIK now
> lacking for years and nobody took care there, even they're using delta rpms
> also for years now there. In fact, I wasn't seeing a working downgrade at a
> bigger Linux distribution until now once delta rpms have been in use there.
>

the downgrade problems are as follows:

1. scriptlets are not reversible
2. downgrading works provided the user data/user config is not modified by 
an update in a one-way process. (ex: mysql upgrade from  4->5 will convert 
a db, but going back the other way won't fly)
3. There are certain processes which no one is ever going to do the work 
to make them reversible: lvm1->lvm2, db transitions, udev migration, 
ext3->ext4.


The problem is not putting the pkg bits back on the disk. The problem is 
all the stuff that goes along with making the bits WORK.

-sv