yum roll back option?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, 2007-01-13 at 02:44 -0600, Arthur Pemberton wrote:
> On 1/13/07, Jerry Williams <jwilliam at xmission.com> wrote:
> > > -----Original Message-----
> [...]
> > Thanks Jeff,
> > I really didn't post here to try and fix my problem, more to look at the
> > whole picture.  If you break your server and lots of people depend on it
> > then that is a bad thing.  And it is hard to have an identical machine
> > sitting there to test on.  I would like to see Fedora 7 more robust so that
> > it would be easy to recover from a problem like this.  Does rpm need to be
> > fixed to keep a previous version or something else?  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.
> >
> > That is looking like I should be keeping a copy of all the rpms on my system
> > so I don't have to try and get them on the system after a problem.
> 
> While I sympathize with your situation. I think your suggestion brings
> RPM way beyond what it should be doing, into the realm of Yum.You can
> have yum cache all files that are downloaded. And unless you do an
> http `rpm -i`, you should have a copy of an RPM, it would then be up
> to you to store it safely. Alone those lines, I was quite dissapointed
> to find out that Fedora had changed the yum default of caching
> downloaded RPMs to not caching them. Maybe it was mentioned in the
> release notes, but I found that out at a rather bad time  - I had come
> to depend on a backup copy of the RPM being in the yum cache folder.
> 
> But back to your point...yum _should_ be able to:
> 1) "rollback"  a package (and maybe it's dependancies) to a previos
> version...downloading the packages if necessart

I think "tsflags=repackage" still works in /etc/yum.conf, right?
Keeping in mind, of course, that a repackaging is not *completely*
equivalent to the original RPM.

> 2) roll back the entire RPM system to a particular point in time..sort
> of like System Restore , or whatever it is called in Windows...a
> restore point I think they call it.

You could try version-controlling the repackaging area
(/var/spool/repackage ?).  Of course I understand you're looking for a
Shiny Red Button, but the back end is mostly there.

> A sample scenario is that a kernel patch/fix/update causes your system
> to bork...and it is not a widespread issue, so you don't except a fix
> soon. At least you could roll back the kernel package - but that is a
> very bad example since the last 2 kernels are kept.


-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
       Fedora Project Board: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board
    Fedora Docs Project:  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20070113/2e899873/attachment.sig>