On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 04:10:03PM -0600, Mike McCarty wrote: > > I'd like to open discussion of relative merits and demerits. I like > the ability to load and unload packages "live", and give things > a test drive before commiting to them. > Things you might want to consider are "how often do I revert a change of the installed packages ?" and "how long does it take to notice that an upgrade gave a problem?".
For me, a series of backups kept for a week or more *mostly* caught the times where I had problems, but two took were more severe and took a lot longer to fix (in the past, a libxml2 vulnerability fix broke something, probably printing, in abiword - re-enabling the vulnerability didn't seem a good alternative; more recently, upgrading beyond gimp-2.6.9 appeared to give problems with *my* usage (process a raw photo using the ufraw plugin, manipulate to fix rotation or perspective distortion, crop to 4:3 format - I no longer had the ratio visible in the gimp). For the latter I ended up ripping out the newer gimp plus a chunk of other stuff. In any case, backups (plus a LiveCD or second system which can mount the affected system and revert it to the backup) seem, to me, to be an essential feature of looking after a system built "my way". I think my own backup scripts are within my current scripts in ~/ken at LFS, but I warn anyone interested that (1.) I use a *lot* of space for my rsync'd backups (typically > 2.5x the data - a version to rsync to (over nfs), then the permanent copies of that) (2.) My scripts probably have all sorts of weird and wonderful bugs that I haven't yet noticed, and (3.) My scripts are definitely *not* safe against memory corruption on the machine holding the backups! [ files get cached - if a cached backup file becomes corrupt, the problem seems to quickly spread through the backups : maybe a reboot might have changed that, but all I'd lost were source tarballs ]. As to using something that isn't in the upstream kernel to handle versioning of the data : it's your data ;) Do you feel lucky ? Well do ya ? In the past, I tried reiserfs3 for test data when development was happening, and sure enough I lost some of that data. That wasn't a problem, but it reinforced my belief that I want a *reliable* filesystem for my data. So, I was slow to move to ext4. If you have a *test* machine, that might be an ideal place to try things out. Just make sure all the *real* data is elsewhere, and verify the contents of backups. ĸen -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
