Switch to a sane packaging and upgrade system

[C. Scott Ananian]

2008/1/16 ffm <ffm at intserverror.com>:
> 1) Alice's teacher wants her to use a flash (non-gnash working) web site for
> her homework. Her teacher had set it up for her in class, but as she walked
> home, her XO was auto-updated to the new version. This undid all of the
> changes that installed non-free flash, and made Alice late on her homework.

I believe this works now.  It's certainly not a technical problem.
Plugins should be installed in /home.

> 2) Bob is a developer. He tries out new packages on his development XO, but
> likes to be up to date with the latest joyride. Due to olpc-update's
> kill-it-all mentality, all of the wonderful things (VLC, Skype, etc) are
> wiped out multiple times a day.

My thoughts are that I would like to write a yum post-install hook
which stashed a copy of the RPMs installed to /home/olpc/.rpmcache.  A
post-upgrade hook (in olpc-configure) would attempt to reinstall all
rpms found in /home/olpc/.rpmcache.  This would address this common
use-case (as well as my own: I keep having to re-install emacs).

Volunteers to write the yum hook welcome; the post-upgrade hook is simple.
 --scott

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