On 04/20/2013 08:45 AM, Tuxle T wrote:
> Dear all
>
> I am Stefan from Switzerland and I am looking for a mentor.
> I currently have been pursuing a BEng in Computer Science at the Zurich
> University of Applied Science.
>
> I am using Gentoo since 2009 on my server and since 2010 on my Laptop.
> The biggest problem I have ever had with the system was undoing broken
> updates of libpng, poppler or dev-libs/gmp
> So, I have got the following idea: I would setup Gentoo's root on
> `BtrFs` so that `emerge` takes a snaphshot every time something is being
> modified. That way, rollbacks will become easy.
> I am not sure if this is the best solution for everyone, because BtrFs
> is still in development and not always an acceptable choice.
> Nevertheless, I believe that this solution is a great one for developers.

For the past couple of years, I've been doing btrfs snapshots of my root
filesystem for all big updates, and it works very well for me.

In order to go along with the Gentoo's "we're about choice" spirit, you
could create a plugin framework that supports multiple backends for
performing snapshots and doing bootloader configuration. That way, you
could make it work with whatever the user's choice of
filesystem/bootloader combination happens to be.
--
Thanks,
Zac