[packman] please, keep more than 1 version

[Manfred Tremmel]

Am Sonntag, 20. Januar 2008 schrieb Miguel Angel Alvarez:
> Hi all,
> Sometimes a package is broken, at least in some circumstances, for
> whatever reason that may or may not be under control of the packman
> team. For example, the libxine1-1.1.9 update broke kaffeine.

The update made problems on some computers, on most systems it worked 
without any problems. When the problem occured, it was not limited to 
Kaffeine. The Problem was fixed as soon as possible (I was not able to 
reproduce it on my computer, otherwise it would not been released.

> Unfortunately, the repository only offers the last package, and once
> it is installed and you realize that there is a problem, it is too
> late to go back to your known working configuration.

Report Problems. When we can't fix it in a short time, we will downgrade 
when it's possible, sometimes it isn't. Kaffeine 0.8.6 which was 
released yesterday e.g. need libxine >= 1.1.9, so a downgrade now, 
would be much more complicate...

> That's why I'm suggesting you to keep at least one release (not minor
> rebuild) before the actual one. Please, it is not so much disk space
> on the servers or management overhead, and it would provide great
> benefit to us all. Otherwise, the only sane option would be to

It is much diskspace, and it's a big handling overhead. At the moment 
the old version is deleted by the upload script, so it's no big thing, 
but keeping the version before can't be done automaticly as easy (e.g. 
subpackage names changes from time to time), so we need to do it by 
hand. The libxine package is available for four SUSE versions and four 
architecures (ppc only on openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3) and includes 14 to 15 
rpms, at all this are 208 binary rpm's and four source RPM's. To delete 
this manualy without deleting a wrong one costs time.

> manually download the packages to keep a local copy just in case. And
> that only works for my local system; if I'm evangelizing or helping a
> friend to upgrade (many times remotely) I have to manually upload big
> packages through my sluggish upstream, which may take hours. Not to
> mention the frustration that a broken system can cause to a newbie.

We do have a lot of mirrors. Most times one or the other is out of sync, 
so you should find the old packages ;-)

-- 
Machs gut    | http://www.iivs.de/schwinde/buerger/tremmel/

Manfred      | http://packman.links2linux.de/