[arch-general] Btrfs snapshots for upgrade operations

[Thomas Bächler]

Am 25.10.2012 15:50, schrieb Leonidas Spyropoulos:
> Hello all,
> 
> Firstly can a TU or developer few it to the dev mailing list, as I don't
> have access.
> 
> Archlinux is supporting btrfs for root filesystem some time now. Have any
> work or thoughts been done for supporting snapshots before update packages?
> This way you can keep record of what's happening to your system and easily
> rollback if something breaks.
> I know Fedora and Suse (if not mistaken) supports that with their package
> managers.
> 
> Of course I am talking about an optional feature enabled only from the
> user, not by default.
> 
> Thoughts, ideas, discussion are welcome.

This is surely a great idea when you have filesystem-level snapshots (as
you have in btrfs).

This sounds like something that can be easily written as a
proof-of-concept implementation in a shell script. Once you work out the
exact mechanics, we can consider either adding this to pacman or as an
external wrapper to pacman, whatever makes sense. (This would be a
discussion for the pacman-dev mailing list.)

What I'm saying is: If you have a more detailed description of how this
scheme should work, preferably together with a simple implementation,
then a much more fruitful discussion will emerge.


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 897 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/attachments/20121025/03475c17/attachment-0001.asc>