Re: [atomic-devel] How to deploy old commits/trees

[Dusty Mabe <dusty dustymabe com>]

On Mon, Feb 02, 2015 at 11:41:33AM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 1, 2015, at 12:01 PM, Dusty Mabe wrote:
> > 
> > Moving around to different commits should really be easier than this. Maybe I am doing it wrong? 
> 
> Agreed =) See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=732526

I knew it didn't seem right :) 

> 
> This sort of stuff is a bit blocked behind what I'll call "command line design".  I made a major
> mistake with ostree in having "ostree admin" be the sysadmin part.  Then there's
> the distinction between rpm-ostree and ostree, which is itself confusing.  However,
> I was trying to use the fact that there was a new command to refocus it around
> system tasks first.
> 
> This case is one where it'd be great to have some "user stories" to run through, like
> what happened here.  What should the commands that the admin runs look like?
> How would they discover the commit ID?  

If the history were easily browsable (like you suggest below) then the
user could discover different commit IDs pretty easily. The commands
the admin runs will depend on the interface. If we want rpm-ostree to
be the "sysadmin" part of it then I think you could overload "upgrade"
or even introduce a "downgrade" option (or "deploy" as you have suggested 
below).

> 
> It'd be pretty easy to implement a command which would just fetch the commits
> and not the rest of the metadata, so "ostree log fedora-atomic/rawhide/x86_64/docker-host"
> would work.  But how much should admins reference the branch name versus
> say just "atomic fetch-history [--depth=X]", "atomic deploy <commit>" or
> "atomic deploy ~5" for the 5th previous commit, etc.

We definitely need something like this. We have all of this history
and information about it but no easy way to access it/browse it. I
think the best idea is to try to model git as closely as possible; people 
should be able to interchange referencing branches/commits/tags.

Also.. an easy way to extract information about each commit would be
nice. If I can look through the "history" and see what rpms were
installed at a certain point that would be useful as I can easily pick
older trees to test to find when something broke. Something like
git-bisect would also be useful, but now I'm getting carried away :)

Dusty