another upgrade, another disaster

[Panu Matilainen]

On 05/31/2012 10:24 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-05-31 at 15:08 -0400, Neal Becker wrote:
>
>> But we can, and should, at least try to make our systems tolerant of failures.
>> Just because we can't test everything.  Defensive programming.
>
> Sure. As someone else said, though, that's an issue in rpm if
> anywhere...

Dunno what kind of failures you're referring to here (not saying rpm 
doesn't have any, just that it's not clear to me in this context), but
the vast majority of upgrade-related issues are not so much in rpm but 
anaconda/preupgrade/yum level of things.

(One of) the recurring themes is
1) user has a system with bunch of non-default packages installed
2) user does an anaconda-upgrade with a DVD
3) anaconda blasts through the upgrade ignoring anything it can't upgrade
4) yum barfs on the resulting broken dependency mess

Anaconda (and perhaps preupgrade as well, I dont know it well enough to 
comment) could be stricter and refuse to upgrade unless all dependencies 
are met, either through user adding/adjusting (3rd party) repositories 
as necessary or removing all offending packages, but that'd perhaps just 
create a different kind of PITA.

It'd help if yum learned how to fix (at least some) pre-existing 
problems instead of just complaining and giving up.

One thing that might also help is changing anaconda & preupgrade to use 
yum distro-sync equivalent instead of the "regular" upgrade.

	- Panu -