Package Update Installation Anomalies

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Wed Mar 17 04:52:29 UTC 2004


On Mar 16, 2004, at 7:58 PM, Anthony Anton wrote:

> I have observed that it is somewhat unreliable to do "in place" 
> updates of packages for other than "base" image packages. In other 
> words, if a package is already installed and there is an update 
> available for that package installing the update regularly results in 
> an unreliable image. The anomalies manifest themselves mostly as 
> runtime walkbacks or errors during installation of a package update. 
> This is not in ALL cases but these days it feels like a 50-50 
> proposition.

It would be very useful to know which packages you are having trouble 
with.  One of the goals of Monticello is to provide exactly that kind 
of in-place update.  In my experience, if you have Monticello installed 
and try to update a package that makes use of it (you can tell from the 
.mcz file extension), it works pretty well.  The only major exception 
to this is Monticello itself - because it is self-hosting, updating it 
can run into odd problems.  Recent versions of MCInstaller provide a 
decent workaround for this by letting you fully unload and reload 
Monticello if necessary, without having to start a new image.

If you're updating packages distributed as changesets, or don't have 
Monticello installed, then, yes, you're likely to have problems unless 
the author has been very careful.

Even using Monticello, there can still be issues with migration of 
existing instances; it would be interesting to try to figure out how 
many of the problems you're running into are of that kind, and whether 
they could reasonably have been fixed.  It may be useful to eventually 
build some kind of explicit migration management into Monticello.

Avi




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