I’m following a guide on how to roll back package upgrades and one option is editing mirrorlist to point to a date on the Arch archive and doing a full downgrade.
Another option it gave was downgrading individual packages but isn’t this essentially an example of the dreaded partial ‘upgrade’. Am I better off using the other option in all cases?
For the record nothing is currently wrong with my system, just asking. Back-ups are like religion. You don’t know if you’ve done it correctly until it’s too late.
If you have a problem, say with the latest kernel or the latest firmware and you can’t solve it, it’s OK to downgrade the single package until a new version is released. This is not a long-term solution though.
For what situation would anyone ever use the repo archive? Only when they don’t know what package is causing the issue? I was thinking it would be to stop dependency issues.
If the package you are downgrading is a dependency of many other packages in your system, you will sooner rather than later get into trouble if the dependent packages get updated. It might not even be possible to downgrade this one specific package without breaking the dependent packages.
In the case described above, you might be better off to downgrade the whole system (the archive method) until the issue you are trying to resolve is resolved. From upstream if that is on their side or in any other way.
Neither solution is really satisfactory. And not a lon term solution.
This all came about because a Wine update broke my WinUAE config and I couldn’t get my Amiga games fix Friday night a month or so ago. Just want to be ready in the future! I agree it goes against rolling release.
It really depends what you need to downgrade. Some packages are fairly independent and can be safely downgraded. The kernel/kernel headers are good examples of that, it is generally safe to downgrade the kernel and headers. On the other hand, if you downgrade icu, you are going to have a bad day.
If you don’t have an understanding how everything is inter-related, it is safer to downgrade the whole system to an earlier state.
Of course, there is another alternative, which is you can build a package for the older version.