Proposal: Rolling Release
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
Tue Nov 11 14:14:32 UTC 2008
Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le lundi 10 novembre 2008 à 17:13 -0600, Les Mikesell a écrit :
>
>> I'm not sure I understand the logic of making upstream deal with the
>> problem that RPM's design introduces. There's rarely an issue if you
>> want to do parallel version installs out of an upstream source - and I'd
>> guess the developers _always_ do that for anything they rely on.
>
> Developpers typically re-create configuration files and data files when
> they do parallel installs. Thus they do not have to deal with
> config/data format conversion and rollback. Which is the main problem in
> doing rpm rollbacks, because unlike on dev stations, we can not afford
> to lose of duplicate user data.
Yes, developers deal with well known real-world situations. If RPM
can't handle this, then perhaps it misses some important design concepts
- like letting the admin decide whether to duplicate or migrate data,
where to put the copies, and what scratch space to use for the process.
A packaging system could present a few simple forms for the needed
run-time choices as a commercial-quality product almost certainly would,
but by avoiding this concept completely, the distro forces the
admin/user to keep a whole spare machine whenever a fallback might be
needed and to find and understand all the low-level migration tools that
the developer would use but didn't have a way to package/automate
because the package manager couldn't accommodate it.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com
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