On Thursday 05 April 2007 07:23 pm, Shawn Walker wrote: > I've had many a "live upgrade" go awry over the years with Linux > distributions. I'd be more impressed with a reliable upgrade system, > even if it requires a reboot with media or special boot mode that is > faster than the current process. "live upgrade" in the "linux" context > strikes me as a "shiny" rather than "practical" thing in my personal > experience.
Yes, and I think it is really important that we don't confuse the term "live upgrade" in the Linux world to mean what LiveUpgrade means in OpenSolaris land. The functionality of apt to perform a dist-upgrade (Chung, is that what you're talking about?) is nothing of the sorts where Solaris allows you to perform an upgrade to a seperate partition/slice and move your configuration and/or changes to the new boot envirionment. For the record, tracking Debian unstable can at whim present breakage, and the nature of the development process forces one to start tracking unstable, for revisions of popular software (gnome, kde, mozilla, etc...), so one finds themself in the quagmire of such. At least this is my experience using Debian. Finally a release comes out and life is good, everything is current. The reason is because what was unstable, is now stable. Over time stable doesn't get some of the new open source software, and frustration appears. As a user of Debian, one is faced with the delima of being stuck with old versions of software, be it your desktop (kde, gnome, sawmill, etc...), tools (gcc, autoconf, libtool, automake), or system (glibc/gtk+), etc...there are many various pieces that are like a carrot in your face to make you want to upgrade to unstable, but you keep holding out thinking a release will become frozen...they even created a testing to try to soften this delima, some say it works...(it's just another complication that bogs down the process). This gets worse the farther you get from the release of stable...which doesn't happen often...all of them were painfully long...bo, hamm, potato, sarge, etch,... Debian release cycle makes the Solaris release cycle look like a fastrack...hard to imagine, but it seems so...;-) I think tracking unstable is much more risky on Debian than Solaris Express, however it's much more convenient as well (i.e., apt works pretty good for that). If you play that game, a good analogy would be like playing live-russian-roulette...eventaully you're gonna take a bullet...and to compare it to Solaris, it would be like BFUing. You have to watch everything closely as there's breakage in the nightlys. With that said, apt kicks @$$ when it works... Here's the $64k question. How can we create a transport for opensolaris that works as well or better than apt? Maybe this would be a good community project. There's a lot going on in packaging, maybe that could leap frog a community effort to create a decent transport, to work with it. apt ain't perfect, and I'm not sure any solution will be perfect, but we can probably do something better than apt. apt is pretty old already. opensolaris has the advantage that apt is already around. Would be good to borrow the good from it and have our own. And I don't mean borrow in the sense of code, but in the sense of concept/functionality. -- Alan DuBoff - Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group Advocate of insourcing at Sun - hire people that care about our company! _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
