On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 8:41 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl@thelounge.net> wrote:
i don't think people *really* like to restore a snapshot of /usr without /var/lib/rpm if they only know what that means at the end

On an rpm-ostree system, /var/lib/rpm is a symlink to /usr/share/rpm.

And that's only because I wanted to avoid depending on a small patch
to rpm to have it look in /usr/share/rpm automatically if /var/lib/rpm
doesn't exist.

If you follow this, you'll realize this also means it's immutable - rpm is
not involved in the upgrade process.  When you download a new tree,
you also download an entire new copy of the rpmdb.  And yes, it's an
efficiency hit.  On the other hand, every upgrade is atomic.