Updates-testing (was: Re: thunderbird upgrade - wtf?)

[Seth Vidal]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009, Jud Craft wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 1:13 PM, Seth Vidal wrote:
>> There's no perfect.
>>
>> we're just going for 'good enough', really.
>
> Ah, so package-rollback is shipped as the "halfway-effective crutch,
> but it's so easy to implement we might as well offer it anyway"
> solution.

actually it is shipped as an easy win for simple 
update-is-broken-and-downgrading-is-painless cases which we run into all 
the time.

Your suggestion of having an lvm snapshot is absolutely appropriate for 
those too - it just requires more thinking ahead of time when the system 
is being setup which a lot of users are not going to do.


> Or, the excellent implementation of an incomplete solution.  [No
> offense to the infrastructure design of yum, just stating the obvious
> here.]
>

There's no complete solution, really. We'd have to know an enormous amount 
about each update and what data it modifies to completely solve the 
problem and we just don't have that info and I doubt we could reasonably 
compile it for EVERY package we maintain.

So we implement a reasonable partial solution and deal with the edge cases 
as they come.

  > On the side, I store all of my user data and documents separate from
> my own actual home partition, and with every install I just wipe the
> home, and then re-link my documents and data to it.

good choice. That's good planning.


-sv