Re: [Ayatana] Updates on Login

[Vincenzo Ciancia <ciancia@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On sab, 2009-07-04 at 15:31 -0300, Paulo J. S. Silva wrote:
> 
> That is a good point. However, the likelihood of a failure in a
> security
> update that doesn't allow for a clean shutdown is very low (it never
> happened to me and I use Linux since 1994). 

I know that perhaps it is overkill to talk about this right now but I
hear too many voices in favour of automatic upgrades.

It happened to me several times in my life that an update broke the
system often in unrecoverable ways. In jaunty, the pre-latest intel
update (sigh) broke Xorg, it could not start because of a problem in
detecting the LVDS. I do not have any clue on how to get elder debs, so
I had to wait next update and use karmic in the meantime. (Let me open a
parenthesis: I could not figure out how to bring the wireless network up
from command line because iwconfig seems to be a no-action nowadays -
NetworkManager does not have a command line interface; usability in
extreme situations should be taken more into account perhaps by making a
specific investigation on the current system).

You can now jump on me and say "aha! that was not a security upgrade",
but the truth is that it happened several times since when I started to
appreciate upgrades (debian potato) and I can't tell when an upgrade was
for security reasons because I never cared to make a distinction.

I think many already stated this, but if the plan is to do any automatic
upgrade, then it MUST be backed up by a sane rollback policy. It just
suffices to keep a copy of the very basic needs of apt, and a copy of
the old debs in the systems with their configuration, we have everything
in place from the technical side.

OTOH, there is the problem that an upgrade may convert e.g.
configuration files to new formats. But this is not going to happen for
a security upgrade, that could be made into a strict requirement.

I recall some discussion about automatized revert on
ubuntu-devel-discuss, but is the idea still appreciated?

Vincenzo