On Tue, 2016-10-04 at 10:39 -0700, Gerald B. Cox wrote: > and I have NEVER used the graphical update since the first release of > Fedora. I've always used yum or dnf. As I mentioned earlier in the past > I've found the graphical tools to be quirky at best - perhaps that has > changed, but since the command line has always worked for me, I've stuck > with it. Apparently I've missed something along the way because now people > are implying that using the command line tools from within GNOME or KDE are > dangerous. What exactly is going on?
It's always been dangerous. It works fine all the time until it doesn't, and then you're left with a pile of broken bits that you get to spend all afternoon fixing. It's pretty simple, really: a process running in a terminal inside a graphical desktop will crash if the terminal app crashes, or if the desktop crashes, or if X crashes. If any of those things happens, your update process just dies instantly, leaving whatever bits it hadn't done yet...undone. This is a situation it's technically more or less impossible to *fully* recover from (it's more or less impossible to figure out and execute precisely whatever scriptlet actions should have happened but did not), and is a pain to more-or-less-practically recover from (you get to hack up some crappy script to detect duplicate packages, run rpm -e --justdb --noscripts on the old NEVR and run dnf reinstall on the new NEVR...) I'm not entirely sure if the KDE graphical updater is safer or not, but I don't think it is, because I think it again effectively just runs the update transaction inside the KDE session, where it will die partway through if KDE or X crashes. The current GNOME update workflow, however, is the most reliable we have, because it downloads the updates then boots to a minimal systemd target with as few things running as possible to install the updates, then boots back to the normal system. This is far, far safer than running the update inside a desktop. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org
