[Yum-devel] pain and suffering and allowdowngrade

[James Braid]

seth vidal wrote:
> Been thinking about allowdowngrade.
> 
> How does that work for things like this:
> 
> yum --allowdowngrade update \*
> 
> Does that revert you back to GA of your distro?
> 
> If we bit the bullet and put in a downgrade command or implemented it in
> plugin what is the behavior for it?
> 
> I'm not looking for bikeshedding, pony-desiring requests. I'm looking
> for real thoughts on how downgrades should work. Maybe downgrade bans
> wildcards?

I'm replying as a sysadmin who is frustrated that the yum-allowdowngrade 
plugin doesn't work.

 From my point of view the only thing I want to do with downgrade is 
install older versions of packages (i.e. yum install foo-1.0.1 when 
foo-2.0.1 is installed).

That's it - we have an internal repo which has a bunch of different 
local packages with different versions and I want to be able to switch 
between them without resorting to using rpm directly.

It would be nice if this simple use case was possible. I think anything 
more complex (downgrading your entire distro) isn't really useful in the 
real world. So yes, I think downgrade should ban wildcards.