Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 18th Jan 2008 14:47 UTC, submitted by erast
"There is no ideal software, it always has bugs. Minor, major or security issues will always exist and modern operating systems need to deal with this fact. What if any software which user installs had a capability to rollback to previously known successful point and operation itself would take no time? What if developer or user has a tool which could checkpoint operating system and capability to revert changes in no time? This is possible if we will marry two great technologies: ZFS and Debian APT. Both technologies now part of Nexenta Operating System which is core foundation for its derivative distributions. Meet apt-clone. The tool which integrates with the NexentaCP system, keeps track of upgrade checkpoints and allows to create/destroy/edit checkpoints by request."
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Member since:
2005-07-24
In case anyone is interested, yum/up2date/rpm have supported "rollbacks" for a long time. Before it upgrades a package, it repackages the old one into a custom rpm along with the actual config files, which one may have made changes to, and archives it for later use, should you decide to revert. The overhead is fairly high because building the rpm can be reasonably time consuming. But it does work. For yum, automatic rollback generation for all updates can be turned on in yum.conf.
Using ZFS transactions does, however, look like an interesting approach.
Edited 2008-01-18 18:56 UTC