My roadmap for a better Fedora

[Callum Lerwick]

On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 10:07 -0900, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> Maybe you can help do what's necessary to get apport integrated into
> our infrastructure.
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureApport

Meh, I was kind of thinking of working on the "rescue image in /boot"
first.

> > 2) Make it simple to roll back to a known good state. We need a "system
> > restore". I know what you're thinking, but our vastly superior,
> > centralized, system-wide package management (and lack of a whole
> > seperate "system registry" namespace) allows us to make this actually
> > work. We need per-package rollback. Period.
> 
> Let me point out that rollback itself would require testing.
> Obsoletes, triggers, (un)post/pre scripts, config file handling... all
> this rpm functionality complicates how successful rollbacks are to get
> you back to a restored system state. How are we going to test if a
> rollback works before you ask people to perform the rollback?

You do it in such a fundamentally simple manner as to be obviously
correct. You do it in a way that makes the system provably in the exact
same state as before, bit for bit. Think versioning filesystems. Think
distributed source control, applied to the entire filesystem. Think git.

There are many options here.

1) Ban everything that breaks rollbacks. Find some other way to do it.

2) Just refuse to rollback the packages that break rollback.

3) A combination of both

This is an example of where we need specific examples of scripts and
such that break rollback to get any farther on this.

First, could you please do something for me. Forget implementation.
Forget the details. Just answer this simple yes or no question:

Is rollback a desireable feature?

> Just start with obsoletes... describe to me how we rollback after an
> obsolete calculation has occurred as part of an update transaction.

I never said I have all the answers. I can't do this alone. "Many eyes
makes all engineering challenges shallow"
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