announcement --- planned Yum replacement now ready for user testing

[Joe Zeff]

On 01/02/2014 03:42 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>
> That would imply that someone actually took the decision to *remove* the
> protections against leaving the system with no installed kernel. Was
> this discussed? What were the proposers smoking?

It's always been a principle that *nix won't stop you from doing 
something stupid if it prevents me from doing something clever.  I can't 
see how removing the installed kernel could be clever, but that might 
have been behind their thinking.

Actually, AIUI, the file isn't removed until the last program that's 
using it closes the file.  Now, I can't swear to it, but it's reasonable 
to think that the kernel keeps its file open so that parts of it can 
come in and out of memory as needed, although that may not be true any 
more because of how much RAM most machines have.  Even so, uninstalling 
the running kernel won't do anything about the copy that's actually 
doing the work, because that's in RAM so as long as you remember to 
install at least one kernel before rebooting, you should be safe.  What 
happens if your system crashes, or there's a power failure before that 
happens is best left as an exercise for the reader.

I'm not saying that I think this is the way dnf should work, but it's 
possible that this is how the devs were thinking.