One option smart needs to conquer the world

[Axel Thimm]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 12:08:34PM -0600, Zach Garner wrote:
> > Modifying a schema upgrade on package upgrade is what is wrong (imho).
> 
> I agree in the general case. But, our package is not for public
> consumption.  Smart's dowgrade feature has never caused us a problem,
> but we have safe guards in place, always due testing and don't
> automate the upgrades.
> 
> My point was simply that the package maintainer doesn't always write
> packages to support downgrades. I suppose it is debatable whether this
> is a problem the package maintainer should have to fix.

o A package should always support uninstalling it
o A package should be reinstallable

A downgrade is in 99% a shortcut of uninstalling a package and
reinstalling another. So you usually get downgrades at no cost at all.

You might encounter issues with downgrades if these are form say FC4
to RH7.3, but within a distribution it would be a bug, at the very
least from the vendor packages.

Also as the original posting was about Fedora Core: Since FC1 there is
updates-testing which is populated with packages that are (supposed at
least) to be downgradable to the previous version, should the package
not hold against public QA. So for Fedora Core you can argue that
downgrades within the same version of the distribution are part of the
distribution mechanism. Other distributions will certainly have
similar fallback mechanisms/QA.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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