If it ever comes to pass, there will be an extensive evaluation to determine which tool is best suited for the job and the environment. The Prime Directive applies: we must not disrupt classes that are in progress or about to start unless they specifically ask for something.
Support for atomic updates is one feature that I won’t compromise on, and while Ansible will definitely be part of the toolkit (on that note: fuck WinRM, all my homies hate WinRM), its idempotent model on its own is not enough to guarantee disruption-free deployments. If the process fails for any reason, the system must roll back to its last functional state. I don’t know if Nix can do that, but when it becomes relevant (so probably never in my professional capacity), I will find the right tool.
Yes, and that is one of the tools that would be evaluated. My immediate problem is that it requires a working OS to rollback to the last filesystem snapshot if the configuration change (which is still not atomic) is interrupted.
The area where filesystem-level snapshots would be amazing is the /home partition, whenever a teacher asks the computer to be cleaned before an exam.
maybe the snapshot could be rolled back by a PXE bootable system. but for the second part, btrfs can do snapshots per subvolume, so if you could create a subvolume on user creation that could work
If it ever comes to pass, there will be an extensive evaluation to determine which tool is best suited for the job and the environment. The Prime Directive applies: we must not disrupt classes that are in progress or about to start unless they specifically ask for something.
Support for atomic updates is one feature that I won’t compromise on, and while Ansible will definitely be part of the toolkit (on that note: fuck WinRM, all my homies hate WinRM), its idempotent model on its own is not enough to guarantee disruption-free deployments. If the process fails for any reason, the system must roll back to its last functional state. I don’t know if Nix can do that, but when it becomes relevant (so probably never in my professional capacity), I will find the right tool.
(for the record, that is not my downvote)
Btrfs and snapshots could help with atomicity, did you consider that?
Yes, and that is one of the tools that would be evaluated. My immediate problem is that it requires a working OS to rollback to the last filesystem snapshot if the configuration change (which is still not atomic) is interrupted.
The area where filesystem-level snapshots would be amazing is the
/homepartition, whenever a teacher asks the computer to be cleaned before an exam.maybe the snapshot could be rolled back by a PXE bootable system. but for the second part, btrfs can do snapshots per subvolume, so if you could create a subvolume on user creation that could work