On Sunday 07 January 2007 18:48, Oren Beck wrote:
Is there any automation of the install/maintain operations that "just plain works" ?
In general, most stuff does just plain work. The only manual operation required in regular use is merging configuration files when they change. There is a tool to assist in this by diffing the current and new configurations.
is there any method of directing an update to"roll back" to the last stable pre-update state if an update breaks?
If an update won't build, it will never be installed. There is a relatively new function in ebuilds for including tests that can be enabled. In this case, the new version will be tested before it is ever installed. If there are no tests available, or you have them disabled (default, as many tests are very time consuming and may add dependencies), your computer has no automated way to determine if the new version works or not. You can usually downgrade back to an old version manually, and I recommend using Subversion on /etc to rollback configuration changes. I always enable the "buildpkg" feature by default-- this tells Portage to make binary packages of everything you install. This way, you can use the -k switch with emerge to avoid a recompile time should you need to downgrade something.