On 03/21/2016 09:02 PM, Hendrik Boom wrote: > On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 05:19:33PM -0400, Boruch Baum wrote: >> >> 3] One complicated solution would be to not destroy >> /var/cache/apt/archive on the target when re-installing. It could be >> done by having the installer suggest to mount that folder on its own >> partition, and then have the installer refer to it at the download stage. > > You'd have to be able to check that the /var/cache was for the same > distro as the one you were testing. Technically, that's right. In practice, I would suggest that it's reasonable to put some responsibility on the shoulders of the user who elects this option. At first, devuan would be the innovator, so there would be no other distro with a reality of a /var/cache/apt/archive mount point partition. If the idea makes sense and would get adopted by other distros, it would only become an issue among families of linuxes that use the same package extensions (eg deb, rpm). For a user who would opt for a common partition for archiving packages from installs of multiple distributions of the same extension, if the filenames were identical, their key-signing would also need to match. Were the keysigning to fail on an archived version of a package, ? (I don't know how apt-get responds - does it recover by downloading a new copy? does it force a sysadmin to manually rm the offender?)
So my guess is that the trouble would only arise when: 1] multiple distros use the technique 2] user is testing those multiple distros simultaneously 3] user uses the same partition for the mount points 4] they are the same package management familly (deb/rpm/etc) 5] the distros don't check the package keysig, or something 'bad' and unrecoverable happens when they fail to match Your point is prudent and in-place, that if devuan wanted to adopt the technique, it should pro-actively have some fail-safe measure. What comes to mind initially would be a label file, identifying to future installs the identity of the previous one. Any distro adopting the technique would be expected to check for the identity file, and reject the mount point if it wasn't its own. The identiy file could be a simple agreed-upon file name with a short text desciption of the distro that put it there. Maybe allow it in the form foo.bar where foo is the extension used by the package manager for the distro and bar is the agreed upon name, so that distros of different package families could co-exist in the same folder. Thus there could be files rpm.identity_filename_standard and deb.rpm.identity_filename_standard in the same folder, along with however many debs and rpms. That's a bit blue-sky and edge-case, but worth spec-ing out as an option. -- hkp://keys.gnupg.net CA45 09B5 5351 7C11 A9D1 7286 0036 9E45 1595 8BC0 _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
