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jernst

Member

From: Silicon Valley

Registered: 2014-03-04

Posts: 307

Howto emergency-downgrade package as maintainer

Imagine I release Big New Release 2.0 of some package, which is A Major Upgrade(tm) to my tried-and-true 1.3 package.

Now one nice afternoon, somebody points out a major security problem that cannot be quickly fixed by improving 2.0. Perhaps 2.0 was designed on faulty assumptions.

Assume I determine my best choice is to have all users go back to 1.x asap.

How would I go about that? Do I need to re-release 1.3 as 2.1? Or is there some Pacman mechanism by which I can say "1.4 supersedes 2.0"?

(This is theoretical at this point, but I'd like to understand what I'd do under these circumstances.)

Thanks,

Johannes.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,459

Website

Re: Howto emergency-downgrade package as maintainer

Is this for a package in the repos, or an AUR package?

This *might* work for both, but defintely for AUR: use the epoch variable.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

jernst

Member

From: Silicon Valley

Registered: 2014-03-04

Posts: 307

Re: Howto emergency-downgrade package as maintainer

This is for a package in the repos.

Epoch: so basically I declare "in the previous epoch, I was being silly, but this epoch, it's much better" :-) That might work! Thank you.

Last edited by jernst (2014-06-16 21:00:01)