On Thu, Feb 01, 2024 at 02:51:54AM +0100, Kevin Kofler via devel wrote:
kevin wrote:
> distro-sync is nice and all, but it's not a silver bullet.
> In cases of simple packages a downgrade may not break anything, but in
> cases where other things already built upon it, where the new one
> changed conguration or interface, or even where the upgrade changed
> data, it can leave things in a pretty unfortunate state.
And the proposed "solution" of bumping Epoch fixes none of that. It just
introduces an Epoch that we will be stuck with forever. It will not
magically make the downgrade safe in any of the 3 situations you describe.
I am unsure when I proposed Epoch's. I'm not a great fan of them either.
In addition to what you mentioned, Epochs have another problem:
Depending on how dependent packages (build)require your package, they
must be adjusted for the new Epoch too.
Anyhow, to be more clear:
I don't think we can or should say "just downgrade whenever you like",
unless/until dnf5 gets rid of update and only has distro-sync.
Nor do I think we should rush to using Epochs. In rare cases we should
go back to older versions, but it should be a discussion and other
alternatives should all be exhausted first (patch the problem and push a
newer update, push a revert of the problematic part, engage with
upstream for a solution, etc).
kevin