Re: rolling back updates

[James Olin Oden <joden malachi lee k12 nc us>]

On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Andrew Ross wrote:

> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I'd like to clarify something... Is RPM capable of rolling back patches?
> 
> That is to say, if I apply version 1.0 and then later upgrade to version
> 1.1, is it possible to remove 1.1 and fall back to version 1.0 without
> having to re-apply 1.0?
>
Yes.  It does so with the transactional rollback feature (BTW with rpm
true patches are not installed, only full packages).  Basically, you use
--repackage when erasing or upgrading rpms, which creates repackaged 
packages of the current rpms you are replacing.  These repackaged packages
are made of the files that are on the system at the time of the erasure
of the old package, so you get any modification to these files (which is
good thing considering that modified config files are important to keep
around).  At a later time you use the rpm --rollback switch to rollback
to the point time prior to the upgrade.  It takes a date argument that
is formated like the CVS -D switch.  So you can specify true dates,
and also things like '2 days ago'. 

Here is a quick example:

	rpm -Uvh --repackage foo-1-2.i386.rpm
	.
	. time passes
	.
	rpm -Uvh --rollback '1 hour ago'

A key point to remember is that a rollback is really an upgrade to 
previous versions.  There is more to this, but this is a good starting
place.  Try googling for "rpm rollback" or "rpm transactional rollback".
BTW up2date supports using this feature now.

Cheers...james