Tricks for laying down good foundations ;-)

[Michal Jaegermann]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 07:18:03AM -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 18:41:59 +0530,
>   Rahul Sundaram <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >
> > I guess something like, if a package that is in @base or @core, is part  
> > of the transaction set, install it first, would work?
...
> >
> > Currently, failures can and often does leave you with a system that  
> > doesn't boot. Not very ideal.
> 
> But even within core there may be orders that packages need to be in.

That is true and upgrading yum or rpm packages to the next distro,
for example, will bring in at least the whole python and glibc and
scores of other packages.   Still that goes only _that_ deep.  You
can install a customized system where everything which was possible
to deselect was deselected and that ends up with something
significantly smaller than a full blown installation.  With what was
proposed you may end up installing in initial stages much more that
you hoped for but still not everything. How much depends on many
things.

I was doing something of that sort "manually" from a rescue
environment when fixing some blown upgrades and this does work.  You
are facing then a tradeoff between reinstalling from scratch plus
configuring everything again or keeping all kinds of customizations.
Depending on a system that tradeoff may look differently.  In any
case such "staging" does not normally update everything in one big
scoop although on some occasion I ended up with a non-working yum
when a needed library was not brought in by dependencies.  That was
fixable as well after some thinking and checking around and likely
would not be different if everything would have been done in one
transaction (anaconda has an extra help in a form of a comps file).

It is not as straightforward as one could expect on the first glance
but the original idea has some merit.

   Michal