Proposal: Rolling Release

[Les Mikesell]

Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:27 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The real missing piece is 'undo' when you find out that a change in the new
>> version breaks something that you need.  Does anyone know if that actually
>> works on systems using conary (i.e. can you back up a major revision)?
> 
> Using hardlink forests, Scott's olpc-update does some of that. It's
> not integrated to rpm/yum but it could easily be turned into a "cheap
> snapshot" without having to wait for ZFS/BTRFS. I am not madly in love
> with it, but it does its job.

I'm not sure returning to a filesystem snapshot is exactly the right 
thing either unless the update fails to run at all.  You may have run 
long enough to make changes you want to keep before discovering the 
showstopper bug.

> You'll find - however- that applications and desktop environments
> often upgrade their storage formats, so your downgrade path may be
> well oiled in the rpm/yum sense, and yet completely unusable for end
> users.

Yes, but that is a problem on its own.  It is just as horrible that you 
can't mount a shared /home for an assortment for an assortment of 
distro's/versions to access simultaneously or serially.  You'd think 
there would be some standards for that sort of thing - or people would 
just avoid applications that can't settle on a format that can be 
backwards/forwards compatible.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesll at gmail.com