ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Michael Zanetti <michael.zanetti@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Friday 15 August 2014 09:52:44 Oliver Grawert wrote:
> hi,
> 
> Am Freitag, den 15.08.2014, 09:34 +0200 schrieb Michael Zanetti:
> > Cool stuff.. I'm a bit worried that you're just lucky though. Not really
> > sure if its a good idea to install something manually and switch back to
> > OTA upgrades. But I'm no expert on OTA stuff. Maybe someone else can shed
> > some light how to do such a thing more reliable.
> 
> there are surely 100 non-obvious things that will break :)
> 
> the obvious one is that after the first OTA your apt and dpkg databases
> are replaced with the ones from the image. so everything you installed
> is gone from them and the system will not know about them anymore.
> most likely your binaries will still be there (not much different from
> what you get by compiling stuff from source and running a "make
> install".)

Ok. I don't see that much of an issue as such installed stuff won't be 
upgraded by apt or OTA anyways. So not real need to keep it in the apt 
database I guess.

> 
> if your package registers with the system anywhere (i.e. a new gstreamer
> plugin that registers with the system gstreamer database) this will be
> overwritten as well ...

This is obviously more critical, however in this particular case not 
problematic either.

> 
> if you don't install any complex things with only libs and binaries
> manual install and switching back to OTA will work. as soon as your
> packages interact with the system at installl time to register to some
> system configuration, this configuration will be removed by OTA
> upgrades.

Hmm ok... So it seems that in cases where you really just install a binary 
(e.g. copying it to /usr/bin/) this is actually a viable option and won't 
break on OTA updates? That's great to know. I was always worried that any 
modification in rw mode would very likely cause future OTA upgrades to fail 
and leave you with a broken system.

Thanks for the explanations Oli!

Cheers,
Michael