Re: how to make Debian less fragile (long and philosophical)

[Raul Miller <raul@usatoday.com>]

On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 12:05:49PM +0200, goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de wrote:
> Another way to make sure you can recover from a broken update is to
> have a second root partition (and don't tell me you don't have 30
> spare Mb) and switch to that on failure. In case of an update, you
> boot from the spare partition and update. If anything goes wrong,
> reboot and your back to the old system.

This is a good idea in some contexts (for example: laptops where you
might not always have a floppy or cdrom drive).  It is no help at all in
others (for example where downtime is bad, or where the machine is being
administered remotely).  [Remember that long-running applications don't
really care if shared libs get blown away -- shared libs are accessed
only at program startup time.]

Or, perhaps the argument is that Debian isn't really intended for
applications where downtime is bad nor where the machine is being
administered remotely?

-- 
Raul