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Re: A case study of a new user turned off debian



I demand that Greg Stark may or may not have written...

[snip - package rollback?]
> all it would take to make the tools handle this would be to somehow make
> apt aware of more revisions of packages. They're all in the pool after all.
> Short of making some king of humongous mega-Packages file with every
> revision of every package -- which apt wouldn't scale up to anyways --
> they're currently unavailable to APT.

> The low hanging fruit here would be to have APT keep packages you had
> installed yourself in the cache rather than immediately discarding them as
> soon as they're upgraded.

I keep some around. I'd prefer better management of this, though: ATM all
that I can do (with apt-get/aptitude) is remove all older versions or purge
the cache.

OTOH I'm running apt-proxy on my dialup box.

> At a minimum keeping one extra revision would at least let you roll back.
> Something more flexible keeping old revisions for n days after being
> replaced would be even cooler.

Yes. It'd help to avoid /var becoming full - this happened yesterday on one
of my desktop boxes. One 'aptitude clean' later, and 2/3 of /var was free.

[snip]
> If apt kept even a single old revision in its cache then rolling back could
> be as simple as
>   apt-get install -t previous libc6

That would be good. (Similarly for aptitude, of course.)

One question occurs, however: should this also (try to) roll back packages on
which $PREVIOUS depends?

> or perhaps a little less automatic,
>   apt-cache show libc6
> to list the available revisions then explicitly
>   apt-get install libc6:2.3.2-8

(Noting reference to "=" syntax elsewhere...)

> Actually this wouldn't really have helped my friend at all because he was
> unlucky enough that the *first* version of libc6 from unstable that he saw
> happened to be the buggy one. That doesn't really happen that often to
> libc6 so he had particularly bad luck there.

Perhaps it should be the default that, when installing from unstable, the
package files for testing are also fetched...?

-- 
| Darren Salt   | linux (or ds) at | nr. Ashington,
| woody, sarge, | youmustbejoking  | Northumberland
| RISC OS       | demon co uk      | Toon Army
|   <URL:http://www.youmustbejoking.demon.co.uk/> (PGP 2.6, GPG keys)

Give me all your lupins!



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