yum roll back option?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 1/12/07, Jerry Williams <jwilliam at xmission.com> wrote:
> Does rpm need to be fixed to keep a previous version or something else?

There are aspects of rpm operation which are very difficult to
rollback.  You are thinking in terms of rpm payload, but you aren't
thinking about things like post-install scriptlet actions, which work
on files in a way which are not tracked by the rpmdb.  There is also
the complication of rpm triggers which are even less obviously
trackable. Triggers are somewhat rarer aspects of rpm packages, but
since they only get...triggered...in certain situations they greatly
complicate the scenario matrix, in ways that can be difficult to
confirm.


> What if rpm had a cache
> that it would keep the previous version and the current version?  And maybe
> an option to purge the previous version.

yum has a caching option, which you are free to enable.
man yum.conf, look for keepcache

Taken together with the available rpmpkg log, you can reinstall older
versions of a package.
I believe there is a yum plugin that you will find useful, if you
don't want to resort to rpm -Uvh --oldpackage, to do the dirty work.
yum info yum-allowdowngrade
"This plugin adds a --allow-downgrade flag to yum to make it possible to
manually downgrade packages to specific versions."

But I have to stress that there is no garuntee that downgrading to a a
previously installed package version for any particular package will
give you back exactly what you had before. scriptlets nor trigger
actions are necessarily rolled-back, along with the trackable
payloads.

-jef