My roadmap for a better Fedora

[Horst H. von Brand]

Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 04:33 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > > Let me point out that rollback itself would require testing.

> Quite do-able. See my reply to Jeff.

> > Let me point out that package rollbacks will never work in general,
> > because updates may contain non-reversable state-full operations (e.g.
> > reformatting databases).

> So, only do such updates in distribution upgrades.

How do you find out if something in a %pre or %post, or even in the package
installation itself, is impossible to undo? Sure, you can require it
doesn't happen, but mistakes are a fact of life...

> Something I'm regretting to note earlier, is that I do not expect the
> per-package rollback mechanism to work across distribution releases.
> It's intended for updates inside releases only.

Great. Get users hooked on "if it breaks, just roll back" and then leave
them out in the cold when they will most likely have a need for it.

> IMHO I think discrete releases are one of our most powerful features. We
> can make drastic changes across the distribution, in an atomic manner.

It has /never/ been "atomic".

> We want to preserve this feature. It allows us to make a clean break
> with previous releases. It allows us to make irreversible changes.

Right.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile 2340000       Fax:  +56 32 2797513