system restore for ubuntu -- few ideas.

[Kent Nyberg]

ons 2005-05-18 klockan 18:39 +0200 skrev Martijn van de Streek:
> On Wed, 18 May 2005, Robert Jameson wrote:
> 
> > I was thinking today about the possibility to make it so users can
> > restore back to a previous state -- this could be done using some
> > tracking information in dpkg and apt-get & synaptic.
>  
> My first question about this proposal is:
> 
> Why would you want system state tracking in Ubuntu?
> 
> The only reasons I can think of for doing it in Windows are the one-way
> trip to DLL Hell and system instability. DLL Hell is prevented by the
> packaging system, and ensuring system instability is why we have testing
> releases and only security fixes in released versions.
> 
> I can agree with backups (dpkg data, list of installed packages, changed
> conffiles and /home basically), because disks tend to blow up a lot..
> but that's not exatly "state tracking".
> 
> Martijn


I could personally think of more usage for something like this.
Some users of computers are not realy "experts" in any sense.  Some
people use computers for simple tasks like reading mails, surfing etc.  
But in some way these users might need to upgrade/install programs.
Those upgrades or new installs might give them problems they want to
have undone. I cant give an example of a problem that they might run
into, but say that they by accident installs something and not noticing
that it removes another package that it conflicts with? This can happen
right?  Sure, users can always ask on irc, mail etc. But *all* users
dont do that. They either dont know how to do it, or they just dont feel
comfortable doing it (though just guessing that).

If they knew that they had a simple way of reverting stuff like this,
then perhaps its a good thing to be able to do it?

This is maybe what you had in mind with backing up dpkg data? That way,
a check against what packages that was recently installed could be
restored..




-- 
Kent Nyberg <nyberg.kent at spray.se>
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