On Sat, Sep 30, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
On 29.09.2023 22:11, Martin Schreiner via openSUSE Factory wrote:
Hello folks,
As some of you may know, there are some limitations regarding update-alternatives that prevent it from working perfectly when using transactional updates. Basically, /var isn't part of the snapshot's data. This means that all files created/manipulated during package installation in /var/lib/alternatives won't be taken into consideration when snapshots are rolled back.
What prevents moving this information into / so it is included in snapshot? It was done for RPM itself.
That the informations update-alternatives stores in /etc nor /var are static and thus cannot be put in the read-only part of the system.
You immediately get problems with AppArmor and SELinux. You cannot assign more than one label to one file.
Since how man years are we now using libalternatives with AppArmor and SELinux? I haven't heard from any problems.
3 - libalternatives supports user overrides: non-root users can override the alternatives by creating their own local preference file in $HOME/.config/libalternatives.conf. This may be done by invoking "alts" directly, as it serves both purposes.
This will turn into support nightmare. It need a tool to query and display what a given program actually is showing where this decision comes from (similar to systemd-cat).
Since how many years are we doing this now already? I'm not aware of any support nightmares, not even of support incidents. It's always interesting to see how skeptical people are about change, even though they've been using it for years without noticing it. Thorsten -- Thorsten Kukuk, Distinguished Engineer, Senior Architect, Future Technologies SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH, Frankenstraße 146, 90461 Nuernberg, Germany Managing Director: Ivo Totev, Andrew McDonald, Werner Knoblich (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg)