[Yum] Rollback option with YUM

[Seth Vidal]

On Tue, 25 Aug 2009, Aawardhan Logandhan wrote:

> Hi all,
> Does YUM support transaction level rollback? i.e., if I upgrade my machine from RHEL 4.0 to RHEL 5.0 using YUM, and if
> something goes wrong I want to rollback the entire transaction, so that the upgrade process does not make my system
> unstable.
> I read this link,
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7034


That article is very old now and never really worked to begin with.

> 
> is this a reliable approach?
> does YUM have a repackage option? and based in the exit option of YUM I can rollback the entire transaction.

No.

Yum has a reinstall command now which can put back the same version. We 
even have a very limited 'downgrade' command which can downgrade to a 
specific version of a specific package. However downgrading an entire 
distro major-version release is never going to happen.

Rhel-4.0->rhel5.0 is a one-way trip with yum.

If you want to do an revert an update like that then you will need to do a 
complete backup of your rhel4 system before you update it.

-sv