Downgrade command ?

[Pascal Bleser]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

linux_learner wrote:
>> On 11/26/06, Pascal Bleser <pascal.bleser at skynet.be> wrote:
>> Would it possible to implement a "downgrade" command, that would
>> downgrade specified (or all) packages to the latest known version ?
>> 
>> It does happen that people add experimental repositories (e.g. latest
>> GNOME or X.org version), find that it causes issues and want to
>> downgrade to the packages shipped with the stable distribution.
>> 
>> With such a "downgrade" command (or a flag to "upgrade"), it would be
>> made a lot easier, as smart has the information about what's the latest
>> version (in the enabled repositories) of all packages.
>> 
>> Hard to implement ?
>> 
>> Can smart be tricked to do that now ?
>> Maybe be setting the RPM database's priority to a lower value than the
>> channels ? (or the stable repository channel's priority higher than the
>> RPM DB ?)
>
> I am in favor of this. It has to be somewhat possible since zen has a
> rollback feature. It would certainly save alot of users frustration
> and headaches.

Note that the current process for doing that with smart is e.g.
smart install libgnome-2.12.0.1-26 ...

You have to specify the full package name-version-release to have smart
consider doing a downgrade.

If one just says
smart install libgnome
it will fail, smart saying that libgnome-... is already installed.

upgrade obviously doesn't work either, as smart will say that a newer
version is already installed (makes sense ;)).

So (IMHO) what we would need is a "downgrade" command, that would
downgrade a package to the latest known version as of the repository
metadata.

Would be very handy at times ;)

Note that it isn't a perfect solution, as downgrading is much more
complex than what it might look like at first sight.
Upgrade may obsolete packages and replace some by others (sometimes one
package replaced by several others), so it will never be perfect unless
using some sort of checkpointing/freezing (and even then it's non-trivial).
But still, even if it only solves 90-95% of the package downgrades
properly (which it does when doing it manually), it would be a big help.

PS: please don't top-post ^^

cheers
- --
  -o) Pascal Bleser     http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
  /\\ <pascal.bleser at skynet.be>       <guru at unixtech.be>
 _\_v The more things change, the more they stay insane.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFFabLgr3NMWliFcXcRAp08AJ0SwkxtN28ztbA0yfHWL5uCTtRUqACeMGfN
cp/WT7Z/jxtnIDSV07cxS+w=
=Yfs9
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----