system restore for ubuntu -- few ideas.

[Martijn van de Streek]

On Wed, 18 May 2005, Kent Nyberg wrote:

> 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.

So we need an "undo" function in the apt frontends (people who use plain
apt-get probably know what they're doing, or should know where to get
help if they get stuck.

Actually, having it in apt itself would be very nice -- I tend to
install build-depends to test package build when I'm too lazy to
pbuilder it.. and the manual cleanup is annoying :)

> 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..

I don't know a lot about dpkg and apt, but I'd save the list from
dpkg --get-selections and make apt "go back" to that state or something.

It wouldn't fix broken user data, but that's Hard to solve anyway if
you want to keep even minimal Debian policy compliance (if you make
creating data backups easier, this problem will probably disappear)

Martijn
-- 
A man with one watch knows what time it is.
A man with two watches is never quite sure.
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