On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 09:33:58PM -0500, Paul Elliott wrote: > I like to do my packaging under sid, because > that is where the packages will first have to run, so > I can test them there. > > But what do you do when your sid system stop work > after doing an apt-get dist-upgrade? X11 stopped working > no screens found.
When running unstable, you really want some way to restore the system to a working state quickly. Ie, backup with convenient means of restore, preferably ones that work when the system became unbootable. I'd heartily recommend a btrfs based scheme here. A traditional filesystem plus a recovery partition can do the trick, but restore with a single command is just too nifty to not have if, say, your X relies on nvidia drivers[1], or some folks upload broken init systems that switch without warning. I for one use this set of subvolumes[1]: boot /boot sys-current / home /home In cron, there is: btrfs subv snap sys-current sys-`date +%Y-%m-%d` When shit happens, you snapshot sys-2001-09-10 back onto sys-current and reboot. If the system is too broken to give you a shell, you append "subvol=2001-09-10" to the kernel's cmdline in grub. This way, you can use unstable without fear. [1]. They stay broken for weeks whenever a new kernel comes, xorg gets a new ABI, etc. But unlike nouveau, they don't crash on my box. [2]. Plus "cache" for /var/cache, plus "kb-cache" for /home/kilobyte/.cache (especially a big ccache), plus SSD/HDD micromanaging, plus tens of chroots, etc, etc. I'd recommend these three for a start, though. And you must not split /usr from /var /bin /sbin /lib /etc or you'll risk them going out of sync. -- Gnome 3, Windows 8, Slashdot Beta, now Firefox Ribbon^WAustralis. WTF is going on with replacing usable interfaces with tabletized ones? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: https://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
