Re: rolling-back, reverting system upgrades?
On 21/12/09, Andrew Sackville-West (andrew@farwestbilliards.com) wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:43:53AM +0000, Liviu Andronic wrote:
> > In other words, if you update the package info and upgrade some
> > packages that come with breakages, you're doomed to start hunting for
> > a fix (in my case, this morning, without X and without internet).
>
> This is the purpose of the testing distribution, to test packages for
> breakage so that bugs don't migrate into stable with the next
> release. With all due respect, if you aren't prepared to deal with
> occaisional breakage, then you should be running testing.
This is indeed true. If you are particularly worried about a package you
can pin it, however.
> > In the old times with Gentoo, breakages occurred more often than
> > needed, but it was quite easy to revert an upgrade: each
> > tree---stable and testing---usually contained several, similar
> > versions of the package (much closer than in Lenny and
> > Squeeze). That meant that whenever something went wrong after a
> > package upgrade, I simply reverted to a previous minor version, got
> > on with my work and waited for a new version to pop up.
>
> as I said above, you can often manually fix things using dpkg and the
> old debs. Sometimes you'd have to force it. But to really make this
> work, you have to keep careful tabs on what packages were upgraded and
> cause the breakage. So far as I know there is no automated way of
> doing this.
You can also use the fabulous facility of snapshot.debian.net to get
specific resources from a particular time in the past. To assist you in
doing this you may wish to run a
dpkg -l > installed_packages_$(date "+%d%m%Y").txt or something
so that you know what version of what you had installed previously.
Rory
--
Rory Campbell-Lange
Director
rory@campbell-lange.net
Campbell-Lange Workshop
www.campbell-lange.net
0207 6311 555
3 Tottenham Street London W1T 2AF
Registered in England No. 04551928
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