[awilfox]

Disclosure: Founded the project, still have a somewhat active role in package maintenance.

Updates/upgrades are a major area of focus and everyone I know who has tried it out was always impressed that they could just `apk upgrade`, reboot, and it'd all still be working fine.

That shouldn't be such a high bar, but there it is, and we manage to clear it.

Reliability is not just about updates. Reliability means shipping stable versions of packages, not betas or unmaintained patches/forks. Reliability means testing on physical hardware of different types, and virtual machines/hypervisors of different types, and seeing all packages working across all of them.

During beta4, me and two others sat at a desk with a PowerBook G4, Power Mac G5, Pentium 4, Core i5, and RPi4, and beat the living ** out of all available packages. We found seven bugs, four of which were reported upstream, the other three being packaging issues we fixed.

That's what reliability means to me.

[imiric]

Thanks for your perspective. It would be good to mention some of that on the About page.

It's great that you focus on testing and stability, but incompatibilities and bugs will still creep through. There are infinite combinations of hardware, software and configuration, and realistically, you can't guarantee that an `apk upgrade` will be 100% safe every time for all users. It's in those situations that a snapshot-based rollback mechanism saves the day.

I'm not trying to diminish the value of the work you and your team are doing. All of that is commendable. I just don't think we can ignore the benefits of atomic upgrades and safe rollbacks that tools like Nix provide. All distros should have some form of this, especially those that advertise reliability as a primary feature.

[awilfox]

I agree that the web site needs a significant amount of rework.

The APK package manager specifically makes all transactions atomic: if `apk upgrade` returns an error, your system is in the state it was before it was executed. If it does not return an error, your system is now updated.

Rollbacks aren't necessarily as easy to do with "just" APK, but we support Btrfs as a first-class citizen and it wouldn't be hard to make snapshots as an APK pre-commit action if you wanted.

[q66]

this is misleading, apk transactions are only atomic if no pre/post-install/deinstall/upgrade hooks run, as every invocation of a hook requires a commit of everything done until that point

they are not atomic in alpine, i highly doubt they are atomic in adelie, they are almost atomic in chimera, though there is still a couple places left that break that and i'm working on them (some of it also requires apk 3.x features and is not possible with legacy apk which both alpine and adelie are using)