[sles-beta] Suggestion to speed up installs/Upgrades/patching for "future" SLE

[Frederic Crozat]

Le lundi 23 juin 2014 à 02:36 +0200, Matthias G. Eckermann a écrit :
> Hello Darren,
> 
> don't you think that we already did consider this?
> 
> The problem with this approach is that it leaves the
> system in an undefinied / inconsistent state for a few
> minutes, and if it crashes then, you have a really bad
> experience.
> 
> Thus we have decided to follow the save way which indeed
> needs a bit more time, but we hope that people appreciate
> consistency and stability over 2-3 minutes of time.

Well, it happens our development team implemented a "sane" way to handle
dracut updates during SLE12 development (Darren, I don't know when you
noticed those dracut "issues), preventing too many dracut initrd
regeneration but ensuring it is called once all packages are updated
(using an RPM feature called "transactions", which was not available
during SLE12). Since it is handled at RPM level, it is safer than trying
to do it at end of installation (ie à la SuSEConfig like SLE11, which
was not run if you were using only RPM and not zypper, for instance).

However, maybe some packages were not migrated to the new "transaction"
way and are still regenerating initrd more often than needed.

-- 
Frederic Crozat
Project Manager Enterprise Desktop
SUSE