Re: Auto install code

[bruce@va.debian.org]

> The deal with Stage 2 is that it has to upgrade everything stage 1 left
> behind. This in itself is easy (and I have that working) but it preforms
> changes to the packages states for which there is no atomic reversal for. 
> 
> That is, if you install libc6 and then delete libc6 you will end up with a
> whole wack of broken packages. Right after you install libc6 it will
> automatically upgrade everything that depended on it. But when you undo
> your install operation it will not un-upgrade the things it upgraded
> seconds before.

My opinion is that you have gone as far as you can go within the
constraints of the design of the Debian distribution, and you should
not worry overmuch about this problem - we've lived with it up to now
with few complaints except from people who are running "unstable" and
_knowingly_took_the_risk_.

After 1.0, you might want to make a snapshot of files that are about to be
over-written or removed, and let people revert their state by one or more
snapshots along with the corresponding package state. Snapshots should
concatenate - in other words snapshot Jan_1 and snapshot Jan_5 together
should get you back to the Jan_1 state, Jan_5 alone should get you back to
the Jan_5 state. Snapshots take a lot of disk space to store. You can
selectively restore parts of one or more snapshots depending on what
packages are downgraded if you want to, but this will require a lot more
logic.

	Thanks

	Bruce