RFC: cleaning up updates and updates-testing

[Robert Locke]

On Thu, 2004-09-09 at 20:49, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:
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> It would appear that on Sep 9, Robert Locke did say:
> 
> > I agree with Mike that old updates should be archived somewhere (a
> > current problem with the new xosd comes to mind), but having said that,
> > I think a compromise is to lose the old test updates but keep any update
> > that has been "released".
> > 
> 
> Hmmmn I didn't even realize that old updates were available... I've only
> been using the "stable" released cores anyway. And updating via yum from
> fedora, Dag, and Freshrpm repositories. For the most part I've been
> happy. But every one and a while I strongly wish yum had an option: "yum
> unupdate package" to painlessly back up to the previous version with of
> course, the same kind of dependency solving that would automatically
> "unupdate" what ever other packages that the previous version of the
> selected package may actually require older versions of...
> 
> As it is, even if I knew where to find the previous versions of
> packages, I would be very nervous of manually backing them out with rpm
> because I wouldn't have a clue how to solve any dependency problems.
> 
> I'm quite sure however that if I acquired such skill, I would certainly
> want to be able to find the previous versions of at least the last three
> months worth of updates... Especially if I were playing with less than
> stable versions...
> 
> I'm curious however, just where is this 27Gig Fedora updates tree?
> 
> And is there a good novice level tutorial, or how-to on how to safely
> back out packages without trashing dependencies???
> 
> Please tell me you don't actually have to do something like a current
> "data" backup. Then replace the whole filesystem from the last full
> backup (assuming you made one) and then create your own custom
> repository containing only versions prior to the suspect date, then run
> yum update from the custom repository. And finally restore the current
> "data" backup.
> 
> Surely it's less work than that, right???? 
> 

Any time I have had to go backwards.....

1) Find the old rpm package file.  In the case of Fedora Core stuff, it
is as easy as going to the original tree or looking through the updates
tree and manually downloading the file.

2) rpm -Uvh --oldpackage packagename-oldversion.arch.rpm
   where the .rpm file is the old version that I downloaded.

3) Of course, this does not take into account all the dependency hell
that I am probably going to face....  Of course, since I use yum for it
all, I can usually figure much of it out by reviewing /var/log/yum.log
and seeing what got updated at the same time.

--Rob