Proposal: Rolling Release

[Les Mikesell]

Callum Lerwick wrote:
>
>>> Debian can do this. The only reason we can not is because we refuse
>>> to.
>> And so far we refuse to be cause we allow free-form scriptlets in rpms.
> 
> And as I was trying to point out, this doesn't stop you from
> uninstalling a package and installing an older version.
> 
> Some concrete examples of scriptlets that would break rollback would be
> helpful here. Right now we're in hypothetical handwavy land.
> 
>> It would be interesting to see how one would upgrade say mysql major
>> version and then roll it back all via packaging.  Something that
>> requires changing the on disk format of your databases and such.
> 
> We went over this in another thread. We really ought to be packaging
> mysql major versions as parallel installable packages.

And postgresql, and Sun's javas and python, and everything else that has 
   3rd party and likely user-created content/code that will break and 
needs a period of overlap to fix.

> Or slap upstream(s) with a salmon until they stop changing on-disk
> formats in backward-incompatible manners...

Yea!  At least, don't encourage them by shipping with no tools to help 
migrate gracefully.  And make the people who store stuff in home 
directories understand that they need to run in nfs-mounted homes with 
both new and old releases of their code hitting it at once.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com