Update Manager / Broken Packages / X Failsafe

[Adam Weiss]

Hey Folks,

You're probably sick of hearing about this, so I apologize in advance.   I
installed the update, X busted (fyi, the vesa driver was broken too- so a
xorg.conf rewrite to use vesa as a failsafe wouldn't have helped anyway),
downgraded the update, everything works, here I am.

The interesting thing that I noticed is that when I started the update
manager after fixing things, it still had stale information.  Clicking on
"Check" caused it to see the new fixed package, but had I not done so, it
would have been perfectly happy to reinstall the busted one.

I'm wondering if this means that the delay time from busted package fix to
actual install is not just two hours for the replication, but actually 24
in cases where the package db is updated by the daily cronjob with a
bad package and the user doesn't actually click the "Check" button.

Would it make sense to change the update manager to automatically try to
check for updates/refresh whenever it's started?

Also, has anyone given any thought to an emergency brake of sorts to halt
broken packages as soon as they're known broken?  Something like apt does
a DNS query that is a combination of the package name and some centrally
controlled domain that if a result comes back- abort the install?  (I
don't know, that's kinda janky, but you get the idea: some cheap scalable
way for the maintainers to immeadiately flag a package as bad.)

I haven't really looked under the hood, but I wonder if it might make
sense to add a roll-back feature to the update manager.  Something along
the lines of when you install a bundle of updates, not only are the
updates downloaded, but also debs for the stuff you have installed that is
going to be replaced.  In the event of something serious (like X failing
to start) a console app could walk the user through a "roll-back"- in less
serious situations, add a button to the update manager itself.  Purge old
packages after the machine has been rebooted one and n days have elapsed.
Something like that...

I suspect that the fallout from this particular broken package might be
pretty nasty and has yet to come... : /

--adam