On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 12:46 AM, Chris Murphy <lists@colorremedies.com> wrote:
The Workstation PRD includes "better upgrade/rollback control" under plans & policies. "• Better upgrade/rollback control If there are any problems with an upgrade or an upgrade breaks a configuration script we want to offer an easy way for users to roll-back such upgrades and changes." The Technical Specification doesn't address this requirement. And I'm also not finding anything in the list archives about it. I'm aware of three possible candidates for implementing snapshots and rollbacks:

There's also OSTree - it's a more invasive vision, as it forces *every upgrade* to be atomic, and at present, you need to reboot.  But on the plus side, every upgrade is atomic =)  And by virtue of being constantly used, it's also constantly tested in real world scenarios.

A lot of "rollback" tools as below badly suffer from the fact that they're only used "in anger" when something went wrong.

I haven't talked much here about using OSTree for the traditional user-owns-machine "workstation" case - as it's near the end of my multi-year plan.  It requires rpm/dnf to be aware of OSTree underneath.

Currently though, I think OSTree works very well for replication-based workstation deployments. This is the case where you run a corporate IT shop, and you have a "corporate standard build" of the OS preloaded with apps, and no ability for users to install apps individually, or change the OS.