Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Aug 8, 2017 15:42 UTC (Tue) by sourcejedi (guest, #45153)
In reply to: Distribution quotes of the week by hadess
Parent article: Distribution quotes of the week

AIUI the command-line tools for deb-based systems are designed to tell the user what to do after being interrupted. rpm isn't. When Fedora blew it up, it required manual instructions to type in and run a whole script, which I can't immediately find looking at the announcement thereof. And the announcement says the script was unreliable anyway, because there's no expectation that RPM scriptlets are written to be idempotent, unlike in Debian.

Not to make a judgement on whether the design _suceeds_, or whether there are gaping pitfalls in it that I haven't seen, but rpm is kind of ridiculous here. Our systems are supposed to survive the odd power failure nowadays.

https://lwn.net/Articles/702629/

Do you want to be KeyKOS, or Novell?

https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/pipermail/oberon/2010/005734.html

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Aug 8, 2017 17:28 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

"AIUI the command-line tools for deb-based systems are designed to tell the user what to do after being interrupted. rpm isn't"

Can you be specific on what "deb based systems" tell users to do? Also you are comparing "deb based systems" with "rpm" which sounds like you are comparing some high level tool to a packing format. That isn't an equivalent comparison. RPM isn't designed to be interactive but higher level tools like rpmconf or yum or dnf certainly can and do offer suggestions.

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Aug 10, 2017 7:33 UTC (Thu) by sourcejedi (guest, #45153) [Link] (1 responses)

According to my test notes in the linked thread (search my username), the next invocation of apt-get will tell you to run `apt-get -f install` if that is required.

You can also see advice to run `dpkg --configure -a`. I think I saw that as well. I don't know what the different circumstances are.

Hopefully both of these are suitable for incorporation into PK as well ala `pkcon repair`, and hence any support for that in the GUIs.

The situation I describe was when dnf was interrupted by a Fedora issue; it provided no such advice, _and according to Fedora's response there was no such automatic command available_.

rpm seems to manage not to advise the specific command which is sometimes necessary either (the rebuilddb one). https://gist.github.com/Paul92/10a7806ae43f5d9ac2ce3f9379...

I can't help thinking of the two LWN articles, which say the foundation that is rpm has not been well-maintained.

Distribution quotes of the week

Posted Aug 10, 2017 11:11 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> According to my test notes in the linked thread (search my username), the next invocation of apt-get will tell you to run `apt-get -f install` if that is required.

So, this is apt-get offering you a suggestion. Nothing to do with deb. Such suggestions are offered by yum/dnf as well when it detects duplicate packages etc. Could the suggestions be extended to cover situations? Very likely, yes. It has nothing to do with the underlying format.

The other article covers recommended best practice which is to run upgrades in a screen multiplexer to reduce the risks from being interrupted. That is a good practice no matter what packaging format you use.