--rollback features request

So… This would be really important to my use case (way more than the other petty issues I reported tonight), but I get that they aren’t a walk in the park, so let’s just this be a place to see if the wishlist is feasible at all.

• the command should be able to work in combination with --pkg

• I get partial {up,down}grades are the eleventh plage of egypt… But if what you are actually caring for is bisecting in the name of bug hunting (and not current system stability), they are important

• you shouldn’t touch the system /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist (or is that me dumb not using the hook?)

• can’t you like pass a temporary file to pacman --config? Or what am I missing here?

[JustinTimperio]

O LOL, so that was not clear. This makes way more sense now.

So I agree once you get into downgrade territory it gets dangerous, but its actually more stable than you think. I haven’t had really any issues falling back short distances(a few days to weeks). I’ll do some testing this weekend to actually confirm some of this. If you want to talk more about your idea checkout the gitter. Its a way easier way to talk. https://gitter.im/pacback/community

[mirh]

“Supersized downgrade” as in, literally the tool. I feel really dumb for not having realized how confusing mixing it up with the “verb” could be.

First, if you have a set of packages that you need to tightly control, hold them in pacman.conf.

Oh, lol, yes. Once found the offending package, if its upstream isn’t quick to deliver a fix, of course that’s the only thing making sense. Guess like this makes it not so much “without strings” anymore. Still…

can be catastrophic to other applications(if versions aren’t synced)

Hence my quite messy premise above. I see how it can’t be stated enough then… though, honestly, if you are already playing in downgrade-land, the expectation would be you aren’t really a kid.

If it can make you feel more accustomed, just think that if you rollback everything to 2018 (i.e. complete downgrade, not partial), it will *still* break nonetheless… because systemd-libs won’t find glibc 2.30, and pacman won’t install libsystemd in its place because it has been marked “replaced” and (not explicitly installed?) packages aren’t handled /s

Third, there is no way for pacback to know what your system looked like before without creating some data.

It’s not needed? My “stable reference” is the current/actual packages. I’m very sorry if I can’t quite put my finger over why such allegedly simple idea is so hard to picture.