[arch-general] pacman new generation

[Leonid Isaev]

On (11/21/11 12:17), Bernardo Barros wrote:
-~> dpkg-reconfigure ? No.. it's not that at all.
-~> 
-~> In fact pacman already have some of those ideas,
-~> it tries to be safe when it keeps old package in /var/cache/pacman/pkg,
-~> but Nix goes further and tries to make sense of all those changes in the system.
-~> 
-~> I just see some other ideas that could be inspiring futures versions
-~> of pacman, that all:
-~> 
-~>   http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/pubs/eupfcdm-cbse2005-final.pdf

Well, it deals with configuration problems after an update...

The point of this paper is basically to automatically test the updated software
version in a VM. The only new concept here is "automatically", perhaps. I
can't imagine anyone who would do a major server/kernel upgrade w/o trying it
in a testbox beforehand.

Updates are supposed to be dangerous, that is exactly why we have
SLES/RHEL/Debian with lots of backports. For example, you update subversion to
a newer version, which has some incompatibility with older DBs. All the NixOS
tests will be fine, but suddenly half of your clients can't checkout. If the
system is important, I wouldn't rely some dumb software and do all tests
myself.

-- 
Leonid Isaev
GnuPG key ID: 164B5A6D
Key fingerprint: C0DF 20D0 C075 C3F1 E1BE  775A A7AE F6CB 164B 5A6D
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 490 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/attachments/20111121/8e1a1aa3/attachment.asc>