On Mon, Jan 24, 2022 at 6:19 PM Adam Williamson <adamwill@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

On Mon, 2022-01-24 at 15:28 +0100, Kamil Paral wrote:
> If this is about power outages, I don't see any problem here. A power
> outage is not the package manager's failure, and so those criteria don't
> apply.

I can see someone proposing it, though. "I lost power in the middle of
an update and now the system is unbootable". Whether it was "caused" by
the power failure or the package manager is kind of a matter of
perspective. I just figured it might be worth a footnote to explicitly
specify that such situations aren't covered, for clarity. It's
technically true that a system whose power got cut could fail all sorts
of criteria, I guess...it just feels more likely that someone might
think this criterion means the package manager is meant to handle it, I
guess.

OK, so what about adding a note like this:

Note: Systems in an inconsistent state

While the package manager must not be the primary cause for breaking a system (unbootable, invalid internal structures, etc), it doesn't have to '''prevent''' these events from happening. So if there's e.g. a power outage during its operation or a package with harmful scriptlets is installed, which breaks the system, this is not the fault of the package manager and the criteria above are not considered violated. Similarly, when the package manager operates on an already broken system (e.g. with an inconsistent rpm database), the correct behavior cannot be guaranteed, and therefore the criteria also don't apply.