Up- and downgrading packages

[Pascal Bleser]

Andreas Hanke wrote:
> Pascal Bleser schrieb:
>> It's possible, I did it myself.
>> Of course, Xorg is pretty complex case to handle, indeed.
>>
>> Well, yeah, Xorg is hard to downgrade (but not impossible).
> 
> Sorry, for the average user who manages getting his system broken
> without knowing in advance ("I've been told that there are updates and
> so I had to add the repo just in case" or "I have found the best channel
> list on the planet with 30 channels, imported it via smart channel --add
> $URL and now my X doesn't start any more"), downgrading Xorg is
> literally impossible.
[...]
> My really general conclusion is that undoing complex packaging changes
> is plain impossible in a depsolver because it requires the depsolver to
> have more knowledge about the packages than the packager had when he
> created the original packages (the ones you want to downgrade to).

Lots of stuff I totally agree with, but it's not the point ;)

I never said "downgrade" would make it trivial for as complex cases as
Xorg or such, but I do think it's still a valuable command to have
because you don't have to go through manually specifying
"package-version" for each package with the install command, as smart
knows what the latest available package is (it's in the channel metadata).

Maybe it should be called "upgrade --oldpackage ..." instead of
"downgrade". It's really a command that makes smart install the latest
known version of a package (or a * thereof).
The "upgrade" command already does that, but it never does a
downgrade, for obvious reasons.

It definitely helped me a few times, but of course I was experienced
enough to work around the problems that have to be solved by human
intervention.

Well, it's just a proposal. I just wonder if it is complex/much work
to implement or not.

cheers
-- 
  -o) Pascal Bleser     http://linux01.gwdg.de/~pbleser/
  /\\ <pascal.bleser at skynet.be>       <guru at unixtech.be>
 _\_v http://www.fosdem.org          http://opensuse.org


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