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#26 2014-05-20 10:56:49

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,447
Website

Re: Automatic upgrade

I don't think tomk was wondering about licensing.  I suspect he was wondering (or at least I am), is there anything real here - or is this more vaporware.


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#27 2014-05-20 18:37:31

Sonnix
Member
Registered: 2014-05-20
Posts: 4

Re: Automatic upgrade

Looking at this discussion I don't think that it is impossible to make auto updates a bit safer. Actually it would be quite trivial to implement if pacman had a dry-run mode.
In more then two years of using arch I only had problems with 3 or 4 updates that resulted in unbootable or unusable system and in my opinion it's quite a good stability result. And of all this errors I only needed the boot CD once to fix the problem, other times the problems could be easily fixed by booting in single user mode. I had more problems with updates on Fedora and that's not even a rolling release distribution.
In my experience to minimize the risk of something going wrong during the update you just have to:
Read all the messages that might be during the update
Carefully examine what you are about to update if some core packages like glibc are going to be updated
Carefully examine what you are about to update if some package wants to be replaced by some other package and choose what to do about it
Check all the .packnew files to see if you need to merge the config files
And of course watch out for errors and conflicts with existing files

In all other cases if there are no messages and errors and nothing is going to be removed or replaced then there is no good reason not to update. If some mirror is out of sync or just plain bad luck and you get some broken package then you will have problems be that an automated or manual update. And there is no way of telling that there will be something wrong with update until you actually do it so there will be no difference if this update was performed manually or automated.

To check for all the possible reasons for not doing the update you would just have to make a dry-run of the update, check for any extra messages on the process and if there are none then do the actual update. If there is something extra then just wait for the user to make the manual update. All of that can be performed by a simple script.

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#28 2014-05-20 20:27:26

Trilby
Inspector Parrot
Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,447
Website

Re: Automatic upgrade

Sonnix wrote:

... All of that can be performed by a simple script.

Then share this simple script.  Ideas are not code.

Last edited by Trilby (2014-05-20 20:27:45)


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#29 2014-05-21 19:19:15

Inxsible
Forum Fellow
From: Chicago
Registered: 2008-06-09
Posts: 9,183

Re: Automatic upgrade

DaveCode wrote:

........... Reading the debates above reminds me why I now limit my forum activity on bright ideas for Arch, such as one needlessly dustbinned after much explanatory effort.

Awwww, you still upset about that !!!


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There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !

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