Rollback if broken after version update

It happens. We have feedback of various things going wrong, for example Xorg won't start and just dumps you to the commandline.

If you have tried to fix it, but no-go, you can rollback to the previous version. The initrd has a boot menu:

Number 5, "Rollback to previous version" will do it; however, there is a catch. It will rollback to the last snapshot of the previous version. If you didn't take a snapshot just before updating, then you might lose something important. If you didn't take any snapshots, there will only be one, that EasyOS takes automatically at the time of the previous update.

Forum member Federico updated from 6.5.4 to 6.6.1, but Xorg was broken. I explained about this "Rollback to previous version" trick:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=142163#p142163

Explained:

EasyOS automatically takes a snapshot at the update. In Federico's case, this will be /mnt/wkg/releases/easy-6.6.1/rw-6.6.1.sfs

The thing is, this snapshot is the status just before the update, so the trick I explained in that post was to copy rw-6.6.1.sfs to /mnt/wkg/releases/easy-6.5.4/rw-<today date in format YYYMMDDHHMM>.sfs

But, no need to even copy it, just a hard link (not a symlink). So why can't EasyOS do that automatically? Yes, now done:

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/4502aeb78fe5d3b2ef945b95a8c6f264474a88e9

So EasyOS has now automatically created a snapshot in version 6.5.4, then updated to 6.6.1. This makes it real easy when you choose "Rollback to previous version" in the initrd menu; you will be back to exactly just before you updated. This is good.

EDIT 2025-02-09:
Improvement, see github:

https://github.com/bkauler/woofq/commit/80a8dd4e2eab0ae2c2f9f21cdb3cfab2676c5b61     

Tags: easy