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

[andré]

Luca Berra a écrit :
>
> On Sat, Oct 09, 2010 at 11:10:36AM +0200, Renaud MICHEL wrote:
>> On samedi 09 octobre 2010 at 05:45, andré wrote :
>>> Note that configuration files that have been changed from the 
>>> installation default are often already saved.  (Generally ".old" is 
>>> appended to the configuration file name, sometimes ".new" to the new 
>>> configuration file.)
>>
>> But here you are only talking about system-wide configuration files, 
>> which are known of rpm as they are part of the package and marked as 
>> config files.
>> But what about user specific configuration files?
>> For the easy kind, where a program will have a single configuration 
>> file (or dedicated directory), a pre-inst script could find it in the 
>> home of each users and backup them. But you have cases of programs 
>> which have configuration scattered in multiple shared directories 
>> (like KDE), or even non-deterministic configuration files and it can 
>> become very tricky to find all the files to backup.
>> And you have the really hard kind, where the same configuration file 
>> may be shared by different packages. For example, plasma applet 
>> configurations are stored in a few ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma* files.
Good point.  So user-specific configuration files would have to be taken 
into account.
BTW, there is a similar complication for some Gnome packages.
So it would take a lot more time and effort to accommodate such rollbacks.
However most packages would be much simpler to reliably roll back.
So it seems useful that packages be marked as suitable for rollback (or 
not).
> +1
> this is the very problem why i believe rollbacks are not that easy
>
Because the rollback will be automatic and must be very reliable, it is 
not something to be taken lightly.  A malfunctioning rollback would be 
considerably worse than the current manual rollback process.

Note that insisting that all backports depend on the same versions of 
required packages as the distro release for which the backport is made 
will considerably reduce one potential source of problems.  As well, if 
a new version of a particular application has important format changes, 
perhaps there should be a policy of not making backports for it.
So candidates for rollbacks would be mostly restricted to applications 
developped and tested for the current release of the distro.
Thus the utility of automated rollbacks would be considerably reduced.

Another 2 cents :)

- André (andre999)