OT yum rollback (was When will Fedora work again?)

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Mon Mar 16 13:08:12 UTC 2009


Seth Vidal wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 12 Mar 2009, David L wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>>> On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 11:01 +0000, Frank Murphy (Frankly3D) wrote:
>> <snip>
>>>>
>>>> Then would it be time for some sort of "rollback" utility,
>>>> so if "yum update something" breaks, maybe �: yum --rollback something
>>>
>>> That's been discussed before. It's fantastically hard to do, short of
>>> snapshotting the whole system.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I saw this article that seems relevant to this discussion
>> a few months back:
>>
>> http://www.linux.com/feature/155922
>>
>> It talks about a "next generation" package manager called
>> Nix that claims to solve this kind of problem I think:
>>
>> http://nixos.org/
>>
>> Whether nix is for real or not, from a naive user's
>> perspective it sure seems like it should be possible
>> to solve this problem.  It basically seems like what svn
>> or other version control systems already do.  They
>> remember changes (and for the case of text files,
>> they store only differences.  For binaries it should
>> also be possible to efficiently store changes... in
>> fact I seem to remember a new update feature that
>> will do something like that).
> 
> binaries are only half of the problem.
> 
> You also have to worry about rolling back the users data.

up2date had rollbacks in RHEL4 and (I think) before. It repackages 
configuration data, but not user data.

What problems have been reported against the way it works?

fwiw (not much, I expect) my current desktop dates back at least to RHL 
and comes via two releases of  Debian. Probably, it hasn't stepped 
backwards by much at any time, but it still works fine on CentOS5. Jumps 
forwards haven't necessarily been in small increments, especially for 
Evolution which I use sometimes, but rarely (maybe more than a year on 
occasion).

There _was_ a problem between RHL 5.x and 6.2, when sharing users' home 
on NFS. Run RHL 6.0, use switchdesk to choose one of those new desktops 
and ~ was cactus on RHL 5.x.


-- 

Cheers
John

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