[CentOS] RPM Autorollback

James Olin Oden james.oden at gmail.com
Wed Jul 13 20:28:04 UTC 2005


On 7/13/05, Maciej Żenczykowski <maze at cela.pl> wrote:
> Hi,
> any idea if (when?) a new version of those RPMs with rollback included
> will become available for CentOS 4?
> Thanks,
> MaZe.

If you mean plain jane standard "RPM Transactional Rollback" feature. 
It should be there, and has been there since somewhere in the RH 9/AS
2.1 days.  If you mean autorollback, then I, and I do not speak for
the CentOS developers, would not expect to see the latest autorollback
code in any release of CentOS 4 as Centos 4 is based on RHEL 4 and
errata for RPM in RedHat releases almost never occurs, and thus such
an update is not likely to occur in CentOS 4.

Also, I would have to say as the person that wrote the autorollback
code, that its not the right choice for most people.   The code
definately as far as I have seen can be safe in its inert state (i.e.
you have not choosen to use it) but once you start trying to use it
(or horrors a CentOS was distributed with it on by default) you have
stepped into the zone of perferct configuration management.  This
especially true if you build packages that have complex opaque
scriptlets, as you must really think through all the different ways in
which your code could run.  Also, as it is presently, there is no way
to know if your scriptlet code is running in a "normal" upgrade or a
"rollback" upgrade (where I work we have a one off patch that provides
this but its truly heinous hack involving semaphore files).   It
doesn't mean this won't be added later, but beyond anything
autorollback is an EXPERIMENTAL feature.

OK, did I scare you way?  Well if not I would happily answer any
questions on using it, take patches to improve it and so on, but I
just felt the caveat emptor needed to be put out there.

Cheers...james
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