You're absolutely right. Still, dpkg doesn't support snapshots out of the box. I could fiddle around with it and i suppose i could make a snapshot before running "apt upgrade", but since that never failed for me, i would touch something very stable for little apparent benefit. Let's say Debian 10 will support btrfs snapshots on updates, i'll consider using btrfs for the next installation, but not before.
Did you read the link from the ostree people? Let's pretend Debian 10 offers to choose between OStree-like updates and btrfs snapshots: I'd probably choose OStree and stick to ext4/xfs.
> Still, dpkg doesn't support snapshots out of the box.
Yes, but it SHOULD, just because ALL REASONABLE FILE SYSTEMS SHOULD SUPPORT SNAPSHOTS. Therefore dpkg should assume that such support is avaiable, or at the very least take advantage of it, when available.
Just to reiterate: You (impersonal!), the "ignorant user", shouldn't have to even have to think about it.
Does this make my point clear?
(I'm only being this obtuse because you're saying "you're absolutely right", but apparently not seeing my point. I'm assuming it's some form of miscommunication, but it's difficult to tell.)
EDIT: Hehe, I'm sorry, that sounded much more aggressive than I intended. I just think that us software developers could and should(!) do much better by our users than we(!) currently do. My excuse is that most of my stuff is web-only, so at least I can't do the accidental equivalent of "rm -rf /", but...
Did you read the link from the ostree people? Let's pretend Debian 10 offers to choose between OStree-like updates and btrfs snapshots: I'd probably choose OStree and stick to ext4/xfs.