Satish's Blog

the discussions i have been involved in on the YUM mailing lists are still going on , and a very recent and important issue has cropped , consider if i have mysql installed in my system and i am upgrading to a higher version , now if i want to rollback then i would have to rollback to the previous version of the database server but not affect the databases and the data , so that would be a tough asking . well a solution proposed for this was that if rollback was developed as a plugin or something for YUM , then it would during package installation warn the user that he is making changes that cannot be rolled back or may be the rollback utility will create a list of applications that cannot be rolled back and thus be excluded during rollback . the final suggestion was that it was not a very good idea to actually implement the rollback utility as a part of yum or as an external module, that was quite disheartening , but looking at the issues there seems no other go , or is there one ...

The posting of this idea for Gsoc has indeed brought out a lot of defects and inconsistencies in the idea and the proposed implementation , I have been having a good set of discussions with the GSoc mentors , my application doesn't seem to be going anywhere but the idea has been getting a lot of shaping and chiseling, ...... to say in short , there are a lot of shortcomings which were not identified before, and the main drawback was that i had not discussed these ideas with people from the YUM mailing lists, the recent discussions i had on the mailing lists show the following shortcomings, which seem to be very obvious now : 1) the utility would be very slow if it used YUM again for the rollback process also 2) i was suggested to use conventional backup and recovery methods, and try improving the backup storage methods and improve the speed eventually . 3) the system would be left very inconsistent , if the rollback process anywhere involved the use of commands such as 'rpm -e...

So finally just a few hours before the closing date for the applications for GSoc , i have submitted my project Application for YUM Rollback Utility to The Fedora and Jboss project, truly speaking i am not actually very sure whether the applications are still accepted or if the time is already up. But people wish me all the best :-) !!

well i should say the past week has been tough , preparing for the exams and also working on this, . . and the good news is that i have almost achieved the initial goals for which this idea was proposed on the forums at www.vit.ac.in/lug/ , some of them are as simple as just uninstalling all the packages that were installed after a particular date using YUM . Well here goes a short summary of some of the work i have put in , the code consists of a set of perl scripts that parse the log file created by yum and then decide which are the packages that are to installed or uninstalled , all these perl scripts are managed by a single 'bash' shell script and this executes the rpm -e and the other commands used for manipulating the packages , and the main puprose for this idea was initially proposed was to undo the changes done through yum and i have achieved that , but at present the scirpts look kind of crude and lack a lot of valuable documentation i should be able to give a lot o...