In <201011161438.54964.jesus.nava...@undominio.net>, Jesús M. Navarro wrote: >Hi, Boyd: > >On Monday 15 November 2010 20:55:58 Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote: >> In <201011151334.06503.lukas.linh...@centrumholdings.com>, Lukas Linhart > >[...] > >> Downgrades aren't supported and can't reasonably be supported in general. >> Specifically, it is impossible to modify the lower-versioned package to >> account for changes brought in by the higher-versioned package. > >It's true that they are not currently supported on Debian, but I don't see >that they can't be supported. > >Downgrade shouldn't be considered as an "upgrade, only to a lower version"
That is what a downgrade is, by definition. >but more as of a rollback: regarding configs and binaries it seems not so >complex; just recover whatever was there prior to the upgrade That's something entirely different and intentionally not handled by the packaging system. There are a few roll-your-own solutions available for Linux, but I don't know of something like Apple's Time Machine that works out- of-the-box. The critical difference is that the packaging system restricts it's actions to system-wide programs and data (and tries to concentrate as much as possible on static data; avoiding as much as possible data that is modified during normal operations), whereas a rollback has to include user-specific data which can be very dynamic. Yes, you have to the user's data as well. While packages don't install to /home, running programs often write there and files written by the higher versions of a program may not be readable by the lower versions of a program. If you want rollbacks, get a system that handles rollbacks. Don't expect the packaging system to do it as implicitly on a downgrade request. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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