yum question, reverting to old packages.

[seth vidal]

On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 00:02 -0400, Robin Norwood wrote:
> seth vidal <skvidal at linux.duke.edu> writes:
> 
> > On Fri, 2006-09-01 at 15:31 +0900, Naoki wrote:
> >> The docs don't mention anything about it but I'm wondering if yum can
> >> handle this sort of functionality :
> >> 
> >> rpm -Uvh --oldpackage http://kickstart/blah/name
> >> 
> >> Right now it seems yum can install a specific version of a package,
> >> but it can't 'rollback' to a version if that RPM is already installed.
> >> 
> >> I'm guessing that's pretty easy for yum to do so maybe it already can
> >> and I'm missing something? 
> >
> > installing an older version is not supported in yum.
> >
> > it could be - but I'm just not sure how happy we should be about
> > supporting that process. It is fairly dangerous.
> 
> It can be fairly important - if the newest package breaks something,
> it's good to be able to easily install an older version, or a version
> between the current version and the newest.  It's ok if a special
> incantation is needed to force yum to act that way, but if the only way
> to get an older package is to go directly to RPM, I think that's less
> than optimal.
> 

My concern is mostly with scriptlets.

It seems to me that there is no way to reliably reverse a scriptlet of
any kind.

so reverting to an older version may not necessarily mean a functional
system for the user.

-sv