3 ms·

I never understood the point of rollback. Suppose you run some upgrade and hit a bug that prevents boot. Okey, you revert, so you can keep running your outdated

I never understood the point of rollback. Suppose you run some upgrade and hit a bug that prevents boot. Okey, you revert, so you can keep running your outdated system. Now what? It's not like whichever broke your upgrade is going to disappear if you simply try again.

Arnavion 2y ago
You report the bug and wait for it to be fixed, and meanwhile you have a working computer and can get on with what you originally wanted to use your computer for.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  How are you even going to diagnose it? You just rolled back . And what was the reason you were even upgrading in the first place? Likely precisely because you needed the upgrade in order to "get on with what you originally wanted to use your computer for" ?
spookie 2y ago
To understand rollbacks it's better to assume the user has itself borked something rather than the system. You don't necessarily rollback to previous package versions, just to the last state everything was working. Sure you can fix whatever you did wrong, but that might imply quite a few things and take time. If you go to the snapshot prior to your changes, it takes a lot less time (just a reboot), less guess work, and you can continue working from a blank slate.
leetnewb 2y ago
I don't know how familiar you are with opensuse tumbleweed, but it is a continuously rolling distribution with a decent amount of automated testing of each release. At times, there can be 2-3 new releases per week. Sometimes only a few packages are updated in a release, sometimes everything is updated. But figure a couple of times a week, there is a new tumbleweed version. One of the most common scenarios of breakage happens when a user adds a 3rd party repo that at times lags behind the Tumbleweed release cycle. Libraries and application versions suddenly conflict and the user could have a partially or fully borked system. A rollback to the last good snapshot makes a lot of sense - the 3rd party repo will usually catch up in a day or two, and the update that previously broke the system can be safely applied.

Arnavion 2y ago

You report the bug and wait for it to be fixed, and meanwhile you have a working computer and can get on with what you originally wanted to use your computer for.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago
How are you even going to diagnose it? You just rolled back . And what was the reason you were even upgrading in the first place? Likely precisely because you needed the upgrade in order to "get on with what you originally wanted to use your computer for" ?

spookie 2y ago

To understand rollbacks it's better to assume the user has itself borked something rather than the system. You don't necessarily rollback to previous package versions, just to the last state everything was working. Sure you can fix whatever you did wrong, but that might imply quite a few things and take time. If you go to the snapshot prior to your changes, it takes a lot less time (just a reboot), less guess work, and you can continue working from a blank slate.

leetnewb 2y ago

I don't know how familiar you are with opensuse tumbleweed, but it is a continuously rolling distribution with a decent amount of automated testing of each release. At times, there can be 2-3 new releases per week. Sometimes only a few packages are updated in a release, sometimes everything is updated. But figure a couple of times a week, there is a new tumbleweed version. One of the most common scenarios of breakage happens when a user adds a 3rd party repo that at times lags behind the Tumbleweed release cycle. Libraries and application versions suddenly conflict and the user could have a partially or fully borked system. A rollback to the last good snapshot makes a lot of sense - the 3rd party repo will usually catch up in a day or two, and the update that previously broke the system can be safely applied.