http://www.osnews.com/story/19180/Transactional_Debian_Upgrades_with_ZFS_on_Nexenta Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:31:25 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?296747 http://osnews.com/thread?296747 Windows has that since Windows 2000... Windows Vista has a fully transactional system since 1 year ago Tx-NTFS...
Welcome in late linux :-) Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (casuto) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?296748 http://osnews.com/thread?296748 That's a different thing. AFAIK NTFS does not support filesystem snapshots. If you're referring to Windows Restore then you're completely off-tracks here.. Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (WereCatf) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?296750 http://osnews.com/thread?296750 And the article is about Nexenta, an OpenSolaris kernel with a Debian userland, not Linux. Casuto is obviously very confused.Edited 2008-01-18 17:03 UTC Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sbergman27) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?296752 http://osnews.com/thread?296752 I'm sure it can be useful, in the same sense that restore points on a virtualized environment are, for instance but...

If I install App A and, as it later turns out, it broke things but in the mean time I installed Apps B, C & D, I can "restore" quickly to the state before I installed A. The problem is, now I have to install B, C, D...

As I said, this is very useful, but when it comes to "apps" (as opposed to system-wide changes) I rather have them be as self-contained as possible, something like (most) Mac OS X apps which are simply a folder with all components inside. To uninstall, just delete that folder.

BTW, I mention this because the summary talks about "installing software" and I consider that whenever possible, not needing to "install" by making apps self contained and therefore not needing an "uninstall" process later, is a better solution than tracking every file system change involved and rolling back later, even if ZFS makes this painless. Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (PowerMacX) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?296760 http://osnews.com/thread?296760 I voted down your comment, as it is offtopic, beyond being trollish.

This article is neither about Windows NOR is it about Linux.

Also, the information you provide is wrong. Windows does NOT have something similiar to the presented ZFS+apt solution. Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Ford Prefect) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?296773 http://osnews.com/thread?296773 I do believe this is meant to do with more than just installing / uninstalling your average Photoshop-esque application ...

This has more to do with complete installations of more complex nature, which might actually suffer from changes in applications.

I'd like to have had this kind of functionality when I once upgraded my OpenLDAP from the 2.2-branch to the 2.3-branch and suddenly nothing worked due to some changes in the database format, causing OpenLDAP to assume the database was empty ...

This happened with Debian and although not a general issue, I'm sure, a rollback of the working version of the application *and* the data associated would have been sweet ... Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (s_groening) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?296785 http://osnews.com/thread?296785 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 Fri, 18 Jan 2008 18:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sbergman27) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?296789 http://osnews.com/thread?296789 ZFS has no need for transactional support because of copy-on-write i.e. it support atomic transactions. Snapshots are free in ZFS while in Windows they will take disk space and you'll wait a while depending on how much data you are 'snapshoting'. Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (andrewg) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?296872 http://osnews.com/thread?296872 It seems that you havent studied what ZFS really is. You should read a bit about it? It IS truly revolutianry and the next generation file system. Why all the hype and fuzz about ZFS? There is some substance about ZFS. Sat, 19 Jan 2008 12:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Kebabbert) Comments