another upgrade, another disaster

[Panu Matilainen]

On 06/01/2012 01:39 PM, Michael scherer wrote:
> 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.
>

Yup. AFAICS anaconda doesn't even so much as warn about broken 
dependencies on upgrade, giving users a false sense of things being all 
peaches when in reality it could be creating an enormous mess. Witness 
eg https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=826686 and 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=826621 - a user might think 
twice before proceeding with an upgrade creating 150-200 broken 
dependencies, all of which silently ignored atm.

	- Panu -

	- Panu -