On Wed, 17 Jun 2009, Bart Smaalders wrote:
Robert Milkowski wrote:
With pkg install while I understand the issues you mentioned still I don't
think this is a best approach to automatically create a new BE. Quite
often there are upgrades that require a reboot but actually not really so
and one can workaround it while OS is running.
But "working around it" is exactly how people get in trouble.
Not necessarily so. No system is perfect and sometimes you need to
workaround specific issues. Making it harded will only introduce even
bigger issues as people will not only try to workaround the problem they
will also try to workaround pkg to do what they want. While specific
functionalities should be discouraged to use it doesn't mean they should
not be there.
Then creating a new BE just because someone installed a package could lead
to a situation when a sys admin did not fully understood he needs to
reboot just because package was installed and maybe will reboot weeks
later with outdated /etc and /var and scrapping his head of what happened.
The other question is: if I install a package A which requires a reboot so
pkg will installed it to a cloned BE what will happen if I try to install
package B which also requires a reboot but I haven't rebooted yet after
installing A. Will install to the same BE which was created for A?
Maybe if there is a package being installed and it requires a reboot it
should fail with an appropriate info that either extra option is required
so it installs to new BE and changes won't take effect until one reboots
to a new BE or an extra --force (or whatever) option is required to
install it anyway but an immediate reboot is highly recommended.
To be on a safe side perhaps a clone of current BE should be created and
once package installed succesfully the new BE would be destroyed? That way
if system reboots while install was hapenning it would boot from the old
(clone) OS automatically avoiding mismatch in kernel modules, etc...
We don't ever want to install incompatible kernel modules into a running
image; if the system gets low on memory the kernel may unload modules at
any time. This would cause the new modules to be loaded at on top of the old
kernel, with ensuing chaos.
good example. Perhaps it should be the only exception then?
If we need to reboot to load a update, we should install that update in a new
boot environment.
If we need to have fewer updates require a reboot, we should focus on
better ways of doing that rather than leaving it to administrative cleverness
to figure a way around the reboot.
It's almost hard not to agree to the above.
Still I'm all for all power for sysadmins with safe defaults even if it
means they will hurt themselves - and yes, they will.
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