[Mageia-dev] Proposal: Updating released versions (long post)

[Frank Griffin]

Renaud MICHEL wrote:
> On Wednesday 13 octobre 2010 at 23:34, Frank Griffin wrote :
>   
>> One way of doing it might be, having identified packages that require
>> this sort of support, to wrap the executables with scripts that do this
>> the next time a user runs the software before the real executable is
>> launched.
>>     
> Now that's getting very hackish.
> I'd rather not have many programs wrapped in scripts that would do some 
> magic on my home dir under the hood. Because with such a "solution" the 
> programs would be always wrapped, even if you never do a rollback.
> How would such script detect that it actually was a rollback and it should 
> do his magic on the config files.
>   

The wrapper script would be specific to the package version which
provided it.  If it finds a saved config file with a name matching its
own version, it restores it and deletes the saved one.  If it doesn't,
it does nothing.

> What would happen if the user did not run that program between the update 
> and the rollback?
>   

Nothing, because the new wrapper script would never have been executed
to save a previous version, so the restored old wrapper script would not
find anything to restore.



> It seems the complexity is not worth the benefit, and those scripts are 
> likely to not be well tested and might make things worse if things are not 
> like they expected.
>   

That's a pretty broad statement, especially considering the complexity
of some of the wrapper scripts we already have.  This is not that
complex, and the benefit of finding a solution is considerable, based on
the previous posts/relies in this thread.