Proposal: Rolling Release

Rahul Sundaram sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Mon Nov 10 20:02:31 UTC 2008


Les Mikesell wrote:

> So the RPM design forces you to not use it at all.  Great. 

Deb or other package management systems are no different here. They are 
all designed to be non-interactive. Debian used to dump questions on a 
terminal for some packages but that is not recommended anymore for 
obvious reasons and everybody is advised to used to use debconf. There 
is only limited magic you can do to workaround incompatibilities of 
certain kinds. Postgres frequently requires a dump and restore.

  But, that
> brings back the concept of migration.  Is there any interest in that, so 
> your upgrade becomes a non-destructive copy that you can test before the 
> old copy is gone?  Disk space is cheap these days.

You have to explain how that will work for a complex dependency set. 
What about say glibc breakage? You are going to need filesystem 
snapshots I suspect.

Btw, disk space is not always cheap. Think: thin clients, embedded 
systems, netbooks like OLPC or eeepc etc.

Rahul




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