[Mageia-sysadm] Possible failure in our update process

David W. Hodgins davidwhodgins at gmail.com
Thu Aug 18 21:34:39 CEST 2011


On Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:46:06 -0400, John Balcaen <mikala at mageia.org> wrote:

> Since most of actors of the QA are simply installing all packages from
> core/updates_testing  (like me) none of us noticed that it would break
>  without KDE 4.6.5 installed and when probably for first updates
> people are using a « fresh Mageia 1» , with several packages in
> updates_testing in the same moment we can't really expect them to
> removed or reinstall/restore a Mageia 1 for every package available in
> testing.

Ouch.  Guilty.

Proper testing would require keeping an image that only gets updated when
packages are pushed from Testing to Updates, and always using that as a
starting point when installing an update from Testing.

For people who can run Mageia under VirtualBox, it would simply be a matter
of using snapshots, to maintain the testing environment (for updates that
don't require access to real hardware).  For those of us who can't, we'll
have to handle that with equivalent imaging/restore.

In most cases updates don't interfere with each other, and the current
system is ok.

Large updates, like kde, which affect a large number of packages, and take
quite a bit of time to test, are different.

Creating a separate repository, just for that type update, is a very good
idea, as it makes it much easier to install all of that update, and only that
update, and would simplify ensuring all needed packages are selected, when
pushing from updates testing to updates.

I'm in favour of using a separate repository.  If mostly automated, that
would be good for all updates.  If it's going to require more work for
the developers though, it may be better to only use the separate repository
for large updates like kde.

Regards, Dave Hodgins


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