[Dextrose] upgrading XOs

[David Farning]

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 9:41 AM, Sascha Silbe
<sascha-ml-reply-to-2010-3 at silbe.org> wrote:
> Excerpts from David Farning's message of Thu Oct 28 03:09:20 +0200 2010:
>
>> When upgrading to dextrose why don't we use 'yum update' to update the
>> the core sugar package?  That seems simpler then carrying around a usb
>> stick and disrupting class.
>
> Others might provide more detailed information, but here's a summary:
> Because - at least for Fedora 9 based builds - yum requires more RAM
> than is available on XO-1. In at least some of the cases, it won't work
> properly, but still continue (leaving the user to believe everything
> went fine).

Ahh, that is not good.

> The Debian package management tools work fine on XO-1. I've only ever
> had trouble with a single package - locales - that required more RAM
> than was available. It caused the upgrade to abort in a not exactly
> user-friendly way, but arguably better than going on as if nothing had
> happened. This particular case is easily avoided by using precompiled
> locales (package locales-all) instead of compiling them during package
> installation (package locales).
>
> More recent versions of yum might be better in one of or even both
> regards: Transaction support might fix the "go on as if nothing
> happened" issue. Memory requirements might have improved as well.
> Hopefully some of the Fedora folks will elaborate on this (all I
> wrote is from my personal experience as a user).

Could either you or alsroot look into this?

I think Steven is shooting to do a test release every other Friday.
Then we can have two deliverables. 1) An Image and 2) a target repo.

Another thought is the the problem with yum is that it was never
optimized for low memory situations.  It was originally conceived as a
way to keep servers up to date.  We might be able to prune the repos
down to only the necessary files.  IIRC yum creates a rather large
python data structure for every available package.

david