yum question, reverting to old packages.

Rahul sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Sat Sep 2 20:00:54 UTC 2006


Richard Hally wrote:
> Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 13:32 -0400, Richard Hally wrote:
>>> So maybe we should remove --oldpackage/--nodeps/--force from rpm. It 
>>> follows the gnome 'dumb it down' approach.  
>>
>> No, we just don't enable these functions in the "helper" apps.  We don't
>> want to help you ruin your system, we'll let you do that on your own
>> with RPM.
>>
>>
> Excellent! RPM considered harmful. Of course our "helper" apps are not 
> helpful when you need help the most. </sarcasm>
> 

Being sarcastic is very unhelpful and wont motivate anyone to help you. 
Kindly avoid that. Yum does add more functionality on top of RPM and 
functionality user needs most is automatic downloading of dependencies. 
You are arguing that Yum should support RPM downgrades which the Yum 
developers dont think in a good idea. What can be done here is perhaps 
write a plugin that does what you want and talk to the developers to see 
whether any API can be exposed to allow you to do so. Remember that 
there are more options than just downgrades that RPM does support and 
layers above it wont. We cant be having this conversation every few 
months anyway.

> Sorry Jesse, perhaps in trying to improve the design of yum or rpm we 
> need to think in terms of reversibility so that updates are not 'forward 
> only'. When considering improvements we need to think about robustness 
> and recoverability.
> 

Well yeah. It would be nice to have RPM rollbacks used more reliably but 
thats different from Yum's ability to do RPM downgrades. If RPM can get 
the ability to do downgrades reliably yum can also support it.

Rahul




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list