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!