Les Mikesell wrote:
On Sat, 2006-09-09 at 12:43, Lamar Owen wrote:
On Tuesday 05 September 2006 22:35, R P Herrold wrote:
This bug hinges, very much, on the non-atomic nature of 'hot' system updates, and the fact that the yum-needed, sqlite-maintinaed cache of pacakges got munged half way through, to reproduce.
Sounds like a database type issue; that is, it could be demonstrated that a multiversion concurrency control (MVCC) mechanism, similar to the PostgreSQL backend, for the whole filesystem, would help this sort of thing. That is, a filesystem on ACID. (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability: the magic mantra of database management).
A real transactional filesystem would allow truly atomic system updates. But, of course, there are definite downsides to that.
I think you are missing the big picture here. Yum is managing the whole system. Given an ACID database, would you expect to be able to upgrade it to a new, potentially incompatible version of an ACID database with transactions in progress? What yum needs is just some special consideration when modifying its own components.
A simple solution...install 3-phase power at your home, dedicate an air conditioned room to the project, buy a VAX and run VMS. :-)