Duffy: A story about updates and people [LWN.net]

On her blog, Máirín Duffy describes four archetypes of Fedora users (Caroline Casual-User, Pamela Packager, Connie Community, and Nancy Ninja) and how they relate to updates of the distribution. Fedora has been discussing its update policy for a bit and Duffy uses the user stories to present her thoughts on how to proceed. "Pamela wants updates to be constant throughout a release, no holds barred — she wants the latest Gimp and she wants it yesterday. Caroline just wants her computer to work — "please don't change a thing — it worked yesterday — if it breaks before my presentation I'm screwed!" Can both their needs be met? I think so! But its easy to completely miss where interests and needs can both be met when the language is so easily interpreted to mean the problem is untenable."

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Duffy: A story about updates and people

Posted Sep 1, 2010 23:14 UTC (Wed) by fandingo (subscriber, #67019) [Link]

The whole "what should be updated during a release" is a big headache. I find Linux users to be the most diverse set of people, and I don't think any kind of consensus could be reached. Not to say that it wouldn't be worthwhile to try.

I think that Fedora has a real chance to improve the update situation. With BtrFS and Fedora 13, users can have the ability to roll-back updates, which should help with broken updates a lot. Creating a good UI for this (i.e. integrating into Kpackagekit) would help a lot.

Duffy: A story about updates and people

Posted Sep 2, 2010 7:40 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Hummm. If an update goes really awry it may probably prevent starting any gui or network, and maybe screw important libraries. You may only be left with a console. In that case, a text-based ui with minimal dependencies (ideally statically liked) is your best option.

Duffy: A story about updates and people

Posted Sep 2, 2010 12:43 UTC (Thu) by fandingo (subscriber, #67019) [Link]

True enough.

I was really referring to the Microsoft way of applying updates. Where you can go into Add/Remove Programs and remove specific patches. Supporting behavior like that with Btrfs snapshots would probably get messy quickly; if you have 6-10 "system" updates that are important enough to be "uninstallable," then you might end up with that many snapshots, which is most likely infeasible.

CLI rescue tools are likely to be the most important.

Duffy: A story about updates and people

Posted Sep 3, 2010 8:39 UTC (Fri) by buchanmilne (subscriber, #42315) [Link]

As far as I understand it, the btrfs integration in yum should provide you a boot option in grub which will boot you into a btrfs snapshot, so you really should be able to have your system back as it was, and allow you to decide what you want to do with the failed update from a fully working system.

Duffy: A story about updates and people

Posted Sep 2, 2010 14:39 UTC (Thu) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

So - in yum now you have yum history.

http://yum.baseurl.org/wiki/YumHistory

and it means you can do great things like:

yum history undo last

Now - that won't work for massive things like "oh I updated from fedora 13 to fedora 14 and now I'd like to go back to 13, please" but it handles most of the things internal to a release pretty well.

Check it out.