Why is manual intervention required anyway?

Question

Hello,
recently there were 2 announcements about "manual intervention required" in the news,
filesystem upgrade
initscripts update
Questions:
1. Do I have to make these changes also, when I do a clean install with the actual image from 2011.08.19?
    If so, they should be mentioned right in the download page, or in the cli when I upgrade, otherwise
    I have to look through all the news back until the date where the image is from.
2.  Why is manual intervention required anyway, just to delete a stupid file? If the problem is, that the package
     does not own the file, then why do you not create a mother package that can do everything for such cases?
Sorry, but I have to add this one: "You should change KISS to KRTFM (keep RTFM)"
Thanks.

Answer 1

I'll add my 2 cents, I don't believe this point has been made abundantly clear yet:
Manual intervention is sometimes required because we don't want to wipe user configuration or possibly break the system. While this is usually solved by installing duplicate files as .pacnew files and informing the user that he / she needs to manually merge the original file with the .pacnew file (migrating possible user configuration along with it), this isn't always a possible solution.
We can't do that if a file holding possible user configuration needs to be changed, but is system critical. An example:
Let's say grub is updated to a new version. Due to a change in grub, the syntax in grub's configuration file menu.lst is changed. We can't make this update for the user because we can't be sure what the user has added to this file. We also can't install the new file as a .pacnew because the new version of grub is not compatible with the old style configuration file, the system may not start up at all!  Hey, we could just delete the old file and put the new file in its place, but the user will have lost all his configuration. Nobody wants that. Imagine having to fix your configuration every time you update. No thanks!
The only decent way to solve this is to request manual intervention, there is no reliable way to do this automatically. This has nothing to do with the amount of effort this would take, some of these upgrades simply can't be resolved automagically. This also nicely explains allan's post:
yaffare wrote:
Allan wrote:Manual interventions is required because we are rolling release.  That means we can not just save big changes for every six months.
Thats not an argument, what does it has to do with rolling release or not? Nothing.
There are arguments like Trilby said with security issues or that its too much effort for your team or you think its not worth the time.
Non-rolling releases can postpone updates that would cause system breakage like the grub update in my example, a rolling release like Arch Linux can't do that. We don't have a 6-monthly 'stable' base to work from, or the option to let updates that would require manual intervention wait till the next 'stable' release.
Distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora don't require manual intervention because the situations where these manual interventions are required are pushed to the new release of the distribution, or are simply allowed to wipe user configuration. The downside to this being that users of those distributions have to wait for a next release to be able to use the new version of some applications.
Now as for this:
yaffare wrote:
If I can delete a file manually, than a script can do the same, as its the same for file for every user and every user who has installed the package has to delete the file.
Basically my question is: Why do you not create a workaround, so that manual intervention is not required?
You, as a person, can tell what changes you have made to the first file. You can also tell if those changes need to be put into the new file, and where they should go. You can tell this because you're an intelligent person capable of reasoning, a computer can't do this. We can create workarounds for quite a few situations, but we can't ever be 100% sure what a user changed or wants to change. We need the user to tell us what he / she wants, thus we require manual intervention.
I hope this explains the need for manual intervention.
Last edited by stefanwilkens (2011-12-29 23:34:49)