Re: [gentoo-dev] About trying to prevent downgrades of packages that cause system breakage

[Ian Stakenvicius]

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On 30/06/12 11:16 AM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Saturday 30 June 2012 07:22:39 Zac Medico wrote:
>> On 06/30/2012 04:07 AM, Pacho Ramos wrote:
>>> I would like to discuss a bit more issues like:
>>> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423087
>>>
>>> Even if there are "a lot" of packages that can cause this
>>> breakage when downgraded, I think it should be prevented and
>>> package managers shouldn't try to downgrade this kind of
>>> packages as they will later cause a total breakage. People is
>>> not supposed to know that downgrading some package system will,
>>> for example, have an unusable gcc.
>>
>> It seems like a die in pkg_pretend would serve pretty well.
>
> doing it on a per-ebuild basis doesn't make much sense.  a simple
> version compare (like we do in glibc as an exception to this rule
> because of its much wider implication) is incorrect: the new
> version might not introduce any new symbols compared to the old
> one, and even if it has, other packages might not have been linked
> against the new symbols. -mike

Instead of preventing downgrade wouldn't it make more sense to figure
out a way to force a rebuild on @system or @toolchain or whatever bits
are broken as soon as the downgrade occurs, rather than just making it
a one-way ticket?  If we could sort this out (and sub-slots may help
with this, but probably we'll need some extra work too) then we could
probably support switching from ~arch to arch at a whim..  Not
necessarily a bad goal.


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