OLPC-Update + RPMs WAS:Re: OLPC XO Opera browser as Sugar activity

[Martin Langhoff]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:46 PM, Erik Garrison <erik at laptop.org> wrote:
> Let's say we dist-upgrade our system.  It's in an unbootable state.
> In our current situation we attempt to avoid:
>
>>  * can leave the system in an inconsistent or even unbootable
>>    state on failure.
>>
>
> ... by holding around the most recent distribution snapshot.  A feature
> is provided to select that older snapshot at boot time.  Correct?  I've
> done it several times in the month+ since I've been at OLPC.

That's reasonably easy with cp -aln, but all the other actions you
mention below involve a ton of work.

> This is a deficiency of package managers which, if solved by us and

I don't think it's trivial to. We are already doing too much to
reinvent unix/linux and that takes from our effort to provide an
education platform.  We have to be lazy on this front. It's not a
laptop or a linux project ;-)

(Of course, we have to do work on linux, and ship a laptop to achieve
our education goals.)

>>  * do not adequately verify the integrity of the resulting filesystem.
>>    (We have actually detected two filesystem data corruption bugs as a
>>    result of carefully auditing our filesystem consistency via the
>>    update process.)

I'm sure rpm has a debsums equivalent.

cheers,



m
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 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
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