[Yum-devel] pain and suffering and allowdowngrade

Skahan, Vince vince.skahan at boeing.com
Wed Nov 5 20:42:31 UTC 2008


I certainly see the difference between backing out one rpm vs. a while
distro upgrade.

Without seeing the requests "people" are asking you for which you're
trying to respond to, I can't speculate whether they want to back out a
full distro or just a honked upgrade of a few things, or both.

I'd suggest they folks who need rollback might perhaps need to learn how
to do things like VMware snapshots (or the like) and actually testing
upgrades in sandbox systems before applying upgrades to production
systems, but I've been around long enough to know most folks don't
normally go to that level of rigor.  They launch and pray almost always.
Me too.

I don't see a reasonable way to back out a full distro upgrade.  It's
possibly possible to do it for simple version upgrades or a rpm or two.
Good example to try would be net-snmp or a perl/python module or
something else like that which has a lot of tentacles and yum ripple to
deal with.

------ vince.skahan at boeing.com ------



-----Original Message-----
From: Seth Vidal [mailto:skvidal at fedoraproject.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2008 12:01 PM
To: yum development
Subject: Re: [Yum-devel] pain and suffering and allowdowngrade

> Confused.
>
> Historically there are feature requests for relatively easy things
that
> have been denied due to fear of (1) below. Most notable example for me
> is the multiple requests for new yum --force and --nodeps switches ala
> rpm which come up frequently.
>
> Answer for that one is always "no way, no how, never ever - don't want
> to take the complaints when you shoot your eye out" or along those
> lines.

>
> Are we now considering scenario (2) below and taking that kind of risk
> for something that seems much harder/riskier to do, yet still denying
> the easy ones like the example above ?
>
> Or did I read the response wrong ?
>

you didn't read the response wrong but these feature requests are not 
analagous in my mind.

--force, --nodeps is: "zomg, wtf, it is broken and I can force it to
work 
right now by taking this hammer and pounding this square peg into this 
round hole, WHAM WHAM WHAM, see, there it, works, told you."

downgrade is (often times): "I just upgraded from pkg-1.1 to pkg-1.2 and

1.2 is borked in stupid ways. I want to go backward from here for this 
package and I don't know what deps it just pulled in for this upgrade so

figure that out."


My concern for downgrade is not the above. It is the people who want 
downgrade to be an entire distro downgrade. Or they want it to actually
be 
a real 'rollback' which implies a great deal more than just downgrading
a 
set of pkgs.

Do you see the difference from my perspective?

-sv

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