Proposal: Rolling Release

[Les Mikesell]

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