Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2015 12:02:27 +0100
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: Thomas Zelch <thomaszelch@gmail.com>
Cc: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] apk package rollback feature?
Message-ID: <20150129120227.2d69bb49@ncopa-desktop.alpinelinux.org>
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On Thu, 22 Jan 2015 09:49:36 -0800
Thomas Zelch <thomaszelch@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Yesterday i ran into an issue with the linux-grsec package.

Which version was it?

> I searched the wiki and help output of apk, but couldn't find a way to
> downgrade the package comfortably.
> I ended up taking an older version of the package from an older iso file
> that i still had in my downloads folder.
> 
> Is there a more comfortable way implemented?
> If not, what does everybody think about it?
> I think it would be a great addition.

I think so too but there are no easy way to solve it. Partially because
there are different ways to run alpine. for example, if you run a
diskless (aka tmpfs) install, the boot media will not be in a package.
Instead it will be a kernel and modloop squashfs image on boot media.
We now have an experimental update-kernel which could have support for
this.

For traditional disk installs, we would need keep old versions of
packages. I think this is ok-ish for stable release branches but not
for edge as it would mean we would keep every package ever built.

Alternatively we would need create new package for each kernel version,
so you could have multiple kernel packages installed in parallel. I
don't know if we want that either.

Other options would be to do LVM snapshots before upgrade and do
rollback of that in case emergency. That would be kinda nice because it
would make the upgrade/rollback atomic. that would not work with the
kernel itself though because /boot on LVM is not supported...

I am open to other ideas how to properly implement a kernel rollback
feature.

> 
> Regards,
> Thomas



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