yum question, reverting to old packages.

[Panu Matilainen]

On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, seth vidal wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 23:13 +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>> On Sat, 2 Sep 2006, 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.
>>
>> People wishing for package downgrades are more often than not folks who
>> run rawhide and other experimental packages and just want an easy way to
>> back out a broken package. When a bad update has broken your system, what
>> difference does it make if downgrade is "potentially dangerous"?
>
> This is the one point that I agree with. I looked at implementing the
> simple flag to allow downgrades to happen provided the user jumped
> through some hoops. I'm a bit crunched for time right now but if you
> want to work on a patch for it I'd take a look.

I'm in middle of moving to a new apartment so hacking time is very limited 
for a few weeks but this is something I've been intending to have a look 
at for a while now. No promises but I'll try to give it a go when time 
allows.

> The criteria for it, however, is that it can NEVER happen automatically.
> There will be no config option that sets it to happen it will only be
> something one does on the command line (and maybe it should implicitly
> disable -y)

I've never liked automatic downgrades either. Something along the lines of 
--allow-downgrade together with explicitly requested package version, eg:
# yum install --allow-downgrade foo-libs-1.4-1
..and if that requires dependencies to be downgraded then you need to 
manually speficy that as well, eg
# yum install --allow-downgrade foo-libs-1.4-1 foo-1.4-1

Sound hoop-jumpy enough to you? :)

 	- Panu -