gnome software shell search provider? [Re: Is Gnome Software ready for primetime?]

Richard Hughes hughsient at gmail.com
Mon Nov 4 14:48:15 UTC 2013


On 4 November 2013 14:31, Miloslav Trmač <mitr at volny.cz> wrote:
> That's true in the _general_ case, and therefore the ability to have
> off-line updates is a good _general_ default.  We should be able to do
> _much_ better for many common cases (at the very least, a package that
> only has one executable, or one shared library, and no other
> executables or shared libraries or data files with unknown function).

Even that's basically impossible to do in a race-free way. The way rpm
works is when you update a package, you actually install the new
package, then remove the old one. So there's a small but significant
time where just launching a command line utility makes it crash.
Without actually stopping the application from starting (for all
users) it's impossible to do correctly with rpm.

> (How can rpmdb get "hosed", and how are offline updates supposed to
> prevent that?)

The idea is you have a small self contained "known good" environment.
There are no locale overrides, no LD_PRELOAD hacks and no debuggers
running, and all the things that make the transaction hang. Similarly,
because there's such a small runtime environment, there's less to go
wrong, e.g. X crashing and that kind of thing. I like what ChromeOS
does where it has a rescue-ish partition, to do the upgrade, but
without something like btrfs that can switch roots on a running
filesystem that's basically impossible on Linux.

Richard.


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