another upgrade, another disaster

[Michael scherer]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2012 at 01:18:23PM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> 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 would be much better to refuse to upgrade than to break later in weird way, 
since users perception would be different.

First, they would either ask for help and then someone could explain what is wrong.

This would also reduce the number of failed upgrade and therefor the number of bugs
that cannot be reproduced, thus making them likely easier to spot and fix.

-- 
Michael Scherer