[Yum-devel] clean up sooner

[Dennis Gregorovic]

On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 16:19 -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 23:10 +0200, Pekka Pietikainen wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 03:43:52PM -0500, seth vidal wrote:
> > > > I wonder if yum would avoid some problems by cleaning old packages sooner?  
> > > > (I'm just guessing here that smart 'clean' means removing old package).
> > > 
> > > It means changing around the sort order for a transaction. Right now yum
> > > uses rpm's transaction sort. 
> > Yes please. There's nothing to ruin your day worse than a remote 1000
> > package yum update where your ssh hangs midway -> yum exits -> you end up
> > with dupes in your rpm database, and repomanage + rpm -Uvh --force *.rpm
> > tricks in the cache directory is to clear things up.
> > 
> > (I started always running yum under screen because of this :D )
> 
> the other option b/c a dead transaction can happen for other reasons is
> to record before a yum transaction what the transaction actions are and
> delete them from the top as you progress through them. Then a user could
> simply replay the remaining pieces if they found themselves hosed.
> 
> -sv

I've tried to think of problems that could be caused by switching the
order of transactions such that each old package is removed immediately
after the new package is installed.  I came up with three items:

1) scriptlets could behave incorrectly if they are executed at a
different time than they are expecting.

2) dependencies for packages being upgraded later in the transaction may
be temporarily broken as the old versions of the packages earlier in the
transaction are removed.  

3) Since this is different behavior that what RPM does, there could be
unknown integration issues.

Seth, I think your idea of a transaction log that could be replayed is
an interesting one and a much safer choice.

Cheers
-- Dennis