Re: rolling back updates

[Andrew Ross <grof rogers com>]

Thanks James... that is exactly what I am interested in.

I'll read up on it.

On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, James Olin Oden wrote:

> 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
>