Re: Stable tag will be slipped Sunday and release engineering will begin Monday

[Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Raphael Marmier wrote:

>> I learned my lesson though -- never upgrade gnome with portupgrade the
>> third time I tried the handy dandy 'gnome-upgrade.sh' script or whatever
>> it was called.  Unfortunately, that to blew up on me and left me with a
>> system that was totally messed up.
> 
> I think there is only one decent conclusion to draw from this:
> 
> We NEED rollbacks!

Could not agree more. FreeBSD-5 has rollbacks, in the form
of snapshots, if we are wise enough to take a snapshot before
trying to upgrade Gnome :-(

The only other alternative, i fear, is only using prebuilt
packages, and a meta packaging tool (apt-get or portupgrade)
which will not update anything without being sure that all
required binary packages exist.

By the way, the horrendous behaviour of the ports system
which completely remove old libraries without ever asking is
a big part of the problem. At least portupgrade saves 
copies in the compat directory. 

I think a more robust system would be to systematically
save all old libraries in compat instead of deleting them
when you do make install in a port.
Once saved in a compat directory, it would be easy to run 
periodically a program which:
- runs ldd on all executables in the PATH (including 
/usr/local/sbin, etc.)
- and checks if some depend on libraries in compat.
In case some library is useless one could ask the user if he wants 
to delete it, or do it automatically if he is careless.


-- 
Michel Talon