[Yum] RPM Rollbacks

[James Antill]

 I've removed the devel mailing list from the Cc.

Creative Innovative <innovative_c at yahoo.com> writes:

> Hi All.
>  
> Seth Vidal in this older mail  chain below, has mentioned that 
> RPM no longer supports rollback.
>
> Is this really TRUE, I would like to know the reason why its NOT supported.

 You might want to ask the RPM maintainers, instead of the yum ones
then? Although I think you'll find that noone has ever "supported" it,
because it never worked reliably enough for anyone to do so. Removing
it was just removing the false advertising.

> I think, RPM currently supports
> --AUTOMATIC ROLLBACK OF A TRANSACTION.
> ie, what I mean is, if you have multiple package installs/erases within 1 single RPM transaction, then if there is a failure,
> for any package install/erase, then prior to failure, whatever other packages that were installed/erased, will be undone. Can someone please confirm this.

 You can "kill -9" rpm (or remove power etc.), it could not possibly
do anything after this so it could not possibly undo anything after
this type of failure.
 However even in the case of a "recoverable" transaction failure
... rpm just aborts as is. This is why yum-complete-transaction
exists.
 Note current stable version (will become 3.2.23) has the "downgrade"
command, and the current stable yum-utils has yum-debug-restore which
uses it. However this is _not_ the same thing (and doesn't give the
same promises) as a database rollback.

-- 
James Antill -- james at and.org