On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 01:40:02PM -0800, Joe Rhett said > On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 06:26:15PM +1100, Rob Weir wrote: > > The general answer is "downgrades are not supported". It is often > > possible to just install the previous versions of packages with "dpkg" > > (look in /var/cache/apt/archives/ for old .debs), but there are no > > guarantees. Installing "apt-listchanges" and "apt-show-bugs" can help > > make sure an upgrade is a wise choice before you do it. > > You've got to be kidding me. This is Debian Unstable. The point is to help find bugs. If you don't want to live on the bleeding edge, then don't. If you do, then you'll have to be prepared for the breakage that sometimes happens. It's not *that* bad. I've been running Sid on my one and only desktop for, I dunno, 2 years now, and I've never lost data to bugs, nor even had my machine unavailable for more than say 15 minutes at a time. > Hm, let's base the stability of our system on whether or not someone > bothered to report a bug? How often do you actually encounter a serious bug before anyone else? Every single serious problem I've ever hit in Sid has already been reported by the time I've checked the BTS. > With no way to go back? Right... Notice that I said "general", by the way. It is often possible to trivially downgrade packages with dpkg, but sometimes it is extremely difficult. Say a package converts a config file from an old format to a new one. Is it supposed to include functionality to revert that change? What if the admin makes some change to the new config file that *can't* be represented in the old format, and then tries to revert it? What if I try to roll back through fifty versions to one that was built against libc5? etc, etc, etc. As you can imagine, the general solution to this is HARD. REALLY HARD. -- Rob Weir <rweir@ertius.org> | mlspam@ertius.org | Do I look like I want a CC? Words of the day: Telex BROMURE Axis Of Evil Arnett assassination spies nuclear
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