Pacman

Historical bug tracker for the Pacman package manager.

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Tasklist

FS#12775 - Pacman: Add feature to switch between testing and stable

Attached to Project: Pacman
Opened by Erwin Van de Velde (evdvelde) - Tuesday, 13 January 2009, 10:37 GMT
Last edited by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Thursday, 23 July 2009, 02:39 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category Backend/Core
Status Closed
Assigned To No-one
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version 3.2.1
Due in Version 3.3.0
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Summary and Info:
I know that downgrading is not supported in archlinux, but it would be nice to have an option to move forward and backward between testing and stable. That way, I could test something and if it fails so hard that it renders working impossible, I could (perhaps with live CD) return to stable. Meaning thus that all packages from testing should be downgraded if they exist in core/extra. In my opinion it would make the group of test users bigger, since they always have a safety net to catch them when it really goes wrong. E.g. I do not have the time to test on a separate system but would occasionaly upgrade to testing for exciting new features IF the way back was easy too.
This task depends upon

Closed by  Dan McGee (toofishes)
Thursday, 23 July 2009, 02:39 GMT
Reason for closing:  Implemented
Additional comments about closing:  Commit 1d19f0896ccc1560a7e2f5b93cfe095b4aefe84a
Comment by Allan McRae (Allan) - Tuesday, 13 January 2009, 11:08 GMT
At the moment, after removing the [testing] repo you can do a "pacman -Syu" and note the packages pacman says are newer that the in the repos and then "pacman -S <list>". If a [testing] user can not handle that, they should probably mot be using [testing]...

Anyway, yaourt has a --downgrade feature that handles this for the user. Maybe we could add such an option to pacman.
Comment by Dan McGee (toofishes) - Tuesday, 13 January 2009, 12:23 GMT
Yeah I'm not sure what we could possibly do here to make it easier. [testing] is an Arch-specific concoction anyway.
Comment by Erwin Van de Velde (evdvelde) - Tuesday, 13 January 2009, 13:23 GMT
You could create a downgrade option like the one yaourt has...
Comment by Xavier (shining) - Tuesday, 13 January 2009, 13:44 GMT
What about removing the warnings "local is more uptodate than repo" which appears on -Su/-Qu, and rather adding an new operation that prints exactly these packages.
Then the downgrade feature would be much easier to implement.
pacman -S $(pacman -Q --desynced)
Comment by Nathanael Schaeffer (john_schaf) - Friday, 03 April 2009, 12:21 GMT
I like shining's idea. Easy to implement yet very useful.
Even better would be pacman -S --desynced
Comment by Nagy Gabor (combo) - Monday, 13 April 2009, 22:53 GMT
I vote for a downgrade option.

As always, I hesitate about a very minor thing before creating a patch:
1. Shall I implement -S --downgrade (-So / -Sn) or
2. -Suu (upgrade+downgrade, ie. install if the version doesn't match).

I prefer the 2nd, because downgrade-only doesn't make sense to me (it may break more things than it fixes), but -Suu may sound fool here (extra --sysupgrade for downgrade?).

Opinions?

P.S. If my today's ML patch will be accepted, the implementation will be trivial. (One more reason for dropping the use of sync_newversion() from _alpm_sync_sysupgrade.)
Comment by Xavier (shining) - Wednesday, 22 July 2009, 12:27 GMT
-Suu patch here : http://repo.or.cz/w/pacman-ng.git?a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/working

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