Re: yum question, reverting to old packages.

[Richard Hally <rhally mindspring com>]

seth vidal wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 00:02 -0400, Robin Norwood wrote:
> > seth vidal <skvidal 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
How does 'rpm --oldpackage' manage it?
The times I have used it it seems to have worked correctly.

Richard