Re: Downgrading packages (with dependencies)
Hi, Boyd:
On Monday 15 November 2010 20:55:58 Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> In <[🔎] 201011151334.06503.lukas.linhart@centrumholdings.com>, Lukas Linhart
[...]
> Downgrades aren't supported and can't reasonably be supported in general.
> Specifically, it is impossible to modify the lower-versioned package to
> account for changes brought in by the higher-versioned package.
It's true that they are not currently supported on Debian, but I don't see
that they can't be supported.
Downgrade shouldn't be considered as an "upgrade, only to a lower version" but
more as of a rollback: regarding configs and binaries it seems not so
complex; just recover whatever was there prior to the upgrade; regarding
formatted data (i.e. a database), yes, there is a problem, since there's no
guarantee that the old data model will be able to hold data added by the new
one but, again, considered as a rollback it's affordable: you can recover
whatever data was by the upgrade time (or you can add a manual hook akind of
that when a config conflict is detected, so the user can manually handle it).
Cheers.
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