recover from broken yum transaction

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2008-09-22 at 22:47 +1200, Martin Langhoff wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Conrad Meyer <konrad at tylerc.org> wrote:
> > Any reason for not having swap? Or if you don't want to use the disk all the
> > time, perhaps create a swap file before doing updates with yum?
> 
> Lots. We are running jffs2 on bare NAND. A NAND partition dedicated to
> a conventional swap would wear out badly. And jffs2 is a compressed fs
> (no per-file flag to disable compression) with very strange
> performance patterns -- a swapfile in there is bad news.
Why? You could create a temporary swapfile when launching yum and delete
it afterwards. It would not cause more wear-out than any other dynamic
file somewhere on the file system.

> > But as you've
> > said before, most users won't be using yum anyways (and even fewer users will
> > actually be getting updates at all). Power users can easily add swap.
> 
> Well, we are using a homegrown update mechanism. It has some
> advantages over yum -- for starters, it works on our hw :-) . Let's
> say that the fact that yum+rpm do _not_ work on our hardware for large
> upgrades - due to memory issues - closes many avenues.
Openly said, based on my experience with my i586, I don't buy this.
Usually, the memory requirements introduced other applications are
magnitudes above that of yum.

However I am not sufficiently familiar with OPLC to be able to further
comment on this.

Ralf