RPM roadmapping

[Les Mikesell]

David Malcolm wrote:

>> Example use case: Over the course of a week, Jake installs 25 new
>> packages. He starts up foo-client and it crashes - but it worked when he
>> started it last week! Jake wants to get a list of packages that were
>> updated in the past week and try rolling some of them back to their
>> previous versions.
>>
>> Yeah, being able to have a "packages installed/updated in the last N
>> days" dialog, with "revert this change" buttons (and love/hate/add
>> comment for testing purposes etc.) would be completely awesome.
>>
> AFAIK there's no good way to get at this direct from a host's local
> data: we have e.g. /var/log/yum.log, but it only records the changes
> made via yum; it seems to me like the place for this to live is inside
> the rpmdb itself.

As long as you are proposing wild changes changes here, why not consider 
(optionally) using a real version control system to manage the list of 
installed package versions, preferably with the option to use a network 
server with many machines appearing as branches.  Then you'd commit your 
list (and leave it to the version control system to store the 
differences efficiently) at any state you might want to recover. You'd 
still have to deal with doing everything in the right order to survive a 
  re-install of some arbitrary number of old packages but you'd always 
be able to find what those packages were and you'd have all the VC tools 
to view the differences between any points in time - or different 
machines if you go the branching route.  The bit of magic that falls out 
of this scheme is that you'd not only be able to fix a still 
sort-of-working machine (as anything relying on the rpm db files could) 
but you could reproduce the installation on a different machine or 
reconstruct it to an earlier state after a complete meltdown.  Of course 
having gone this far, I'd want a scheme to also version-control the 
local changes to each machine's config files with the same mechanism so 
the same tool would show both the installed package differences and the 
config differences between any points in time or different machines.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com