Adventurous yet Safety-Minded

Alexander Kahl e-user at fsfe.org
Wed Mar 10 12:54:13 UTC 2010


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On 03/10/2010 01:06 PM, Steven I Usdansky wrote:
> Instead of worrying about the occasional brokenness caused by an update to a stable release, how about focusing on a mechanism to easily recover from it? 

There is no real recovery for traditional package systems as each change
on a package (install, update, remove etc.) changes the state of the
system as a whole, i.e. the system relies on side effects (mostly
writing files into shared/global locations) and provides no referential
transparency for such actions, same output for same input is never
guaranteed.
Even if you do provide something like rollbacks for yum you'll never
really return to the original system state so at some point something
will break irrevocably.

A real solution for a healthy life on the bleeding edge and the
side-effect problem would be to dump the global state paradigm and thus
RPM and yum altogether and adopt a system like Nix (http://nixos.org/).

- -- 
Alexander Kahl
GNU/Linux Software Developer
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