Re: PSA: Do not run 'dnf update' inside GNOME, KDE or any other graphical desktop on Fedora 24

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On 10/04/2016 02:01 PM, Neal Gompa wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 1:53 PM, Adam Williamson
> <adamwill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Tue, 2016-10-04 at 10:39 -0700, Gerald B. Cox wrote:
>>
>>> and I have NEVER used the graphical update since the first release of
>>> Fedora.  I've always used yum or dnf.  As I mentioned earlier in the past
>>> I've found the graphical tools to be quirky at best - perhaps that has
>>> changed, but since the command line has always worked for me, I've stuck
>>> with it.  Apparently I've missed something along the way because now people
>>> are implying that using the command line tools from within GNOME or KDE are
>>> dangerous.  What exactly is going on?
>>
>> It's always been dangerous. It works fine all the time until it
>> doesn't, and then you're left with a pile of broken bits that you get
>> to spend all afternoon fixing.
>>
>> It's pretty simple, really: a process running in a terminal inside a
>> graphical desktop will crash if the terminal app crashes, or if the
>> desktop crashes, or if X crashes. If any of those things happens, your
>> update process just dies instantly, leaving whatever bits it hadn't
>> done yet...undone. This is a situation it's technically more or less
>> impossible to *fully* recover from (it's more or less impossible to
>> figure out and execute precisely whatever scriptlet actions should have
>> happened but did not), and is a pain to more-or-less-practically
>> recover from (you get to hack up some crappy script to detect duplicate
>> packages, run rpm -e --justdb --noscripts on the old NEVR and run dnf
>> reinstall on the new NEVR...)
>>
>> I'm not entirely sure if the KDE graphical updater is safer or not, but
>> I don't think it is, because I think it again effectively just runs the
>> update transaction inside the KDE session, where it will die partway
>> through if KDE or X crashes.
>>
>> The current GNOME update workflow, however, is the most reliable we
>> have, because it downloads the updates then boots to a minimal systemd
>> target with as few things running as possible to install the updates,
>> then boots back to the normal system. This is far, far safer than
>> running the update inside a desktop.
> 
> I have never heard of anyone reaching out to the KDE PK frontend
> developers for supporting this mechanism. As I recall, it required
> special development to get working in GNOME Software. Heck, even the
> system upgrade stuff required custom development and special plugins
> for GNOME Software. If you're going to suggest that people do it this
> way, then perhaps you should be reaching out to the Plasma Discover
> and Apper developers to ensure that it works from there too...
> 
> 

The requisite functionality was built in PackageKit specifically to ensure that
it was available for any desktop that wanted to use it. Obviously, since GNOME
Software developers were the ones who developed it, they did the work to make
sure it functions properly there.

Nothing stops KDE or any other mechanism from using this functionality (it's
exposed in the public PackageKit API). See my other replies on this thread for
information on how you could do it from the `pkcon` CLI in a pinch...

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