Re: [atomic-devel] GSOC 2016 project proposal - Rollback upgrades

[Giuseppe Scrivano <gscrivan redhat com>]

Hi Amila,

Amila Sampath <pgasampath gmail com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I am Amila Sampath, and Engineering student form University of
> Peradeniya, Sri Lanka. Since I'm a Linux lover, I planed on working
> with a Linux related project for the GSOC 2016. I found interesting
> with your project of rollback Linux upgrades. I have experience with
> Linux since 2006, and I have made my own customized Linux distribution
> on last year.
> Working through with the project, I would like to get some more
> information about the project. I think about the project and I came
> out with some solutions for this project. One is backup the system
> before upgrading the new Linux vision and this will cost HDD space of
> user PC. Other method, is to search and save old vision file links
> form a given server and for rollback, download that files build up the
> old file structure. In this method it will cost Internet service
> charges to users. And another method was to while upgrading the
> system, scan the new file and old file and save the difference of the
> file in another file and replace that data when the system is
> rollback.


have you already tried to install Fedora Atomic in a VM and play around
with it?  What you are proposing is already done by OSTree.
What the rollback upgrades project should do is: 1) do the upgrade, 2)
boot to the new version once, 3i) check that it worked and make the boot
to this version persistent.  3ii) If it didn't work, then rollback
automatically to the previous version.  The key point here is how to
check if it worked or not.

Before you start digging into it though, I suggest that you try at least
these basic things: install Fedora Atomic, do an upgrade, build your own
tree on your workstation and rebase the Fedora Atomic VM to use it.

Regards,
Giuseppe