an idea about upgrades

[Matthew Miller]

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 11:53:38AM -0600, jd1008 wrote:
> It would be a great idea if Fedora would provide
> a way to downgrade to the immediately previous release
> (from which the upgrade was performed), if the user
> decides (for some reason) to return to the previous
> release. This would completely obviate the need to
> do a backup, and restore - especially for a 1TB or
> more drives (I have a 4TB drive, for example).

So, as has been noted, this is hard with RPM, because RPM has a lot of
assumptions that backwards isn't something one needs to care about. The
snapshot approaches are one solution. However, there _is_ another idea
we're kicking around. Take a look at Project Atomic —
http://www.projectatomic.io/ — and its Fedora Atomic incarnation (best
to start with F22, as we had to make an incompatible change,
ironically). This allows seamless "atomic" change between current,
updated, or earlier releases.

Right now, this is focused specifically on a narrow use case: running a
server where your application runs in a container (with Docker and
Kubernetes). However, the basic rpm-ostree technology that's used for
Atomic updates could be used for other situations as well.


-- 
Matthew Miller
<mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader