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>One of the coolest areas of package management is that you can go back in time and boot up into a previous state of the system, all thanks to the new packaging
by totfz 8y ago
>One of the coolest areas of package management is that you can go back in time and boot up into a previous state of the system, all thanks to the new packaging system. To do this, simply open the boot menu, choose the boot volume, and select Latest state or a nicely time stamped ‘version’. Very cool.
New versions of programs may modify the user config files in a way that old versions may not be able to read those config files anymore and even corrupt them. How is this handled, if at all?
- waddlesplash 8y agoWhat config file format are you using that applications would corrupt newer ones? The only one I can think of would be raw memory structs written to disk, which is nasty and ridiculously unportable even across 32-bit vs. 64-bit, let alone other architectures. On Haiku, config files are generally either plaintext (kernel/drivers/a few core apps, so they are easily editable) or archived-BMessage format. The former are almost always read and not written, and the latter are key/value based so at worst the application would just not know about the new keys, and possibly remove them, which isn't the end of the world.
- zlynx 8y agoConfiguration changes depend on the developers. For example, I used to use Evolution on Linux / Gnome as my email client. Their attitude to compatibility is terrible. As in, they just don't care at all. If you allowed it to upgrade your Evolution data store there was no going back. In a BeOS case it would be as if it migrated to different configuration keys in the new version, then the old version would detect corruption, throw a fit and erase ALL the keys.