yum question, reverting to old packages.

[Jesse Keating]

On Sat, 2006-09-02 at 12:56 -0400, Richard Hally wrote:
> Yup, I agree that --force and/or --nodeps are a Bad Idea. I'm
> suggesting 
> that --oldpackage is different.

I'm failing to see how --oldpackage would be different.  Packages are
designed to go forward.  If a horrible mistake was discovered in a
package, an update is crafted to carefully repair the damage.  However
forcefully installing an OLDER package may not do the cleanup correctly
and may actually trigger the horrible mistake to take action.  There is
UNDEFINED results here and they shouldn't be played with on a user's
system.

> Also, --erase <current pkg> followed by --install <previous pkg>
> should 
> not produce "bad results". If it does, there is something wrong with
> the 
>   particular package design. 

Or just a horrible mistake in the packaging.  Case in point a %postun
that is conditional to run for a final removal, not an upgrade.  If you
remove the package, that particular postun will occur and could be
something horrible like rm -rf / (wheee hyperbole!).  However a new
package could be released which fixes this horrible mistake.  You'd be
Upgrading to the newer package, so the postun for final removal wouldn't
be triggered.

Scriptlets are fun.  All kinds of evil can be embedded in them, and rpm
has no real mechanism to sanitize, track, or recover from anything a
scriptlet may do.  And even if it did, somebody'd just make a scriptlet
that removed whatever database rpm used to keep track of such changes.
Whoops!

I personally think its good that yum decides to not play Russian
Roulette with a user's system, preferring to stick to actions that are
not 'overrides' of rpm's basic protective natures.

-- 
Jesse Keating RHCE      (geek.j2solutions.net)
Fedora Legacy Team      (www.fedoralegacy.org)
GPG Public Key          (geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub)
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