[Rpm-maint] Removing repackage and (auto)rollback?

[Panu Matilainen]

Before anybody asks: I actually do think that ultimately rpm should be 
able to support reliably rolling back transactions. It's just that the 
current repackage+rollback combo fails to deliver it, as there's no way to 
undo script actions.

So... I'm considering axing the rollback and related code out of rpm, two 
somewhat separate parts here:

1) Configurable repackaging of on-disk contents on erasure, manual 
rollback from cli. While not terribly intrusive, it's in my view an 
unsupportable feature because it fails to deliver reliable rollbacks and 
cannot be fixed (because of the fundamental issue with scriptlets 
doing things outside rpm's control).

2) Automatic rollback on failed transaction. Conceptually it's an awfully 
nice feature, but as it's based on 1) which is unreliable to begin with... 
To make matters worse, it's a feature that practically nobody uses, tests 
or works on (James Oden who wrote the feature is in "the other rpm" camp 
AFAIK) and which non-trivially complicates the transaction code for a 
practically unused (and unusable) feature.

Me thinks it'd be more productive to investigate related items that could 
be reliably implemented than attempt to "fix" what's fundamentally 
broken...

Thoughts?

 	- Panu -