Keeping old versions of packages

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 10 Apr 2013 09:24:49 +0200
Jan Zelený <jzeleny at redhat.com> wrote:

> On 9. 4. 2013 at 12:25:56, seth vidal wrote:
> > On Tue, 9 Apr 2013 11:18:54 -0500
> > 
> > Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 00:05:45 +0800,
> > > 
> > >    Mathieu Bridon <bochecha at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > > >The current behaviour would be obtained by setting it to 1, and
> > > >setting it to 2 would already be a positive change as it would
> > > >allow downgrading a package if the update went wrong.
> > > 
> > > I don't think that is really what you want either. The idea is to
> > > keep recently obsoleted updates around, not 2 or 3 versions of
> > > everything.
> > > 
> > > The change has some other benefits. Reverting bad updates in
> > > rawhide would be easier. You can use yum downgrade instead of
> > > having to going look at koji and download builds. Dealing with
> > > packages dropping out of repos when moving between test and
> > > updates. The latter issue is especially bad with branched during
> > > freezes.
> > 
> > So - this is just an idea - and not necessarily a good one - but
> > what about moving older pkgs which are not in the initial release
> > repo into an updates-archive repo.
> > 
> > We could leave the repo disabled by default and only keep 2 copies
> > of any single pkg name in the repo at a time.
> > 
> > That way in the best of all possible worlds you'd have at most 4
> > copies of a pkg in total:
> > 1 - in the base release 'everything' repo
> > 1 - in updates
> > 2 - in updates-archive
> 
> I'm not sure this solves the initial problem - downloading new
> metadata every 6 hours or so ...


I wasn't trying to solve that problem. The problem I did solve was the
updates repodata growing forever if we keep more than one version of
the pkgs in there.

-sv