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

[Zac Medico]

On 06/30/2012 11:33 AM, Andreas K. Huettel wrote:
> Am Samstag 30 Juni 2012, 13:22:39 schrieb Zac Medico:
>> 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.
>
> As a comparatively simple, user-oriented workaround, since this only happens
> at downgrades and these should be pretty rare, I have the following
> suggestion:
>
> Make a portage feature that is **on by default**, which causes portage to
> generate a binpkg of the version to be unmerged, in the case of a downgrade.
>
> Rationale:
> * if you know what you are doing, you can switch this off easily
> * does not take much space since downgrades are rare
> * should help our users a lot, whenever someone accidentally or not-knowingly
> downgrades something critical.
>
> Thoughts?

I like that idea. I've filed this bug:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=424275
-- 
Thanks,
Zac