maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Seamless Software Upgrade v4.2008.36-5 is out!

vinc17	2008-10-03 , 11:17
Posts: 227 \| Thanked: 53 times \| Joined on Feb 2008 @ Lyon, France	#423

Originally Posted by Benson

Wrong. It's possible, but only if you've anticipated the potential for trouble and cloned to an SD.

But the point is that most users don't anticipate and don't clone to SD (users don't always have a SD or have space on the SD anyway).

Originally Posted by Benson

When you have a non-booting system with a HDD, you can pull it, put it in another system, mount it read-only, and go look at logfiles, etc.

With other systems (e.g. Debian), this isn't needed: boot messages are output to the screen, so that one can see what's going on and possible errors. This is not always convenient, but still much better than having nothing at all like on the tablet. Moreover, one can enter single-user mode from the firmware, so that one can try to fix things.

Originally Posted by Benson

There's also some tools that may be installed in the initfs to give you a USB networking (with telnet/ssh) or USB serial connection. This gets you a shell before it loops and you can diagnose/repair things from there.

Sounds really interesting. Any more information, please?

Originally Posted by Benson

While there are some issues with this update, they mainly boil down to packaging and package-deployment issues. There is no real inability to diagnose failures, and anyone who can't clone to SD probably couldn't diagnose the failure in any case.

No, this needs to anticipate. One should really be able to diagnose the failure without anticipating and without having a spare SD. This isn't much a problem for this failure as it occurs for many users, so that some of them can diagnose it. But some other uncommon failures could really be hard to diagnose.

Last edited by vinc17; 2008-10-03 at 11:19. Reason: typo