Arch Linux

georgia_tech_swagger

Member

From: Upstate, SC

Registered: 2008-07-02

Posts: 138

Website

Old Package Repo?

So ... just in the last 14 days I've found myself rolling back a dozen packages for a completely bricked X and non-functional nVidia drivers ... as well as rolling back the MythTV upgrade as it turns the database into a useless sack of goo where TV and themes don't work ... and there's no updated plugins.     I feel like running pacman -Syyu is the equivalent of playing Russian roulette.    While there are a number of good sites with archives of old packages, going and downloading a dozen packages every time I update is getting very old.    Is there an active repo of old packages so I can just issue:

pacman -S oldrepo/mythtv  ?

Some semblance of quality control would be nice.   When you're willfully breaking everybody using graphics card vendor x, or all secondary and important packages to y ... there's a problem.    You can become so bleeding edge you bleed to death.

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Res Publica Non Dominetur

Laptop:  Arch x86 | Thinkpad X220 | Core i5 2410-M | 8 GB DDR3 | Sandy Bridge
Desktop:  Arch x86_64 | Custom | Core i7 920 | 6 GB DDR3 | GeForce 260 GTX

tomk

Forum Fellow

From: Ireland

Registered: 2004-07-21

Posts: 9,839

Re: Old Package Repo?

Another rant thinly disguised as a question. No doubt you are working on a proposal in relation to improved quality control. I look forward to reading it.

In the meantime, read the Downgrade Packages page in the wiki, paying particular attention to the section about ARM (Arch Rollback Machine).

Finally, if you truly believe that the Arch devs are "wilfully breaking" things, you should change distro immediately.

mikesd

Member

From: Australia

Registered: 2008-02-01

Posts: 788

Website

Re: Old Package Repo?

Laptop:  Arch x86 | Thinkpad T61 | Core 2 Duo T8100 | 2 GB DDR2 | Intel GM965
Desktop:  Arch x86_64 | Custom | Core i7 920 | 4 GB DDR3 | GeForce 260 GTX

Pretty beefy systems. I'm guessing you have plenty of hard drive space. I may be wrong. If you are having as many issues with upgrading as you say perhaps you should keep old packages around yourself. I never clear my pacman cache and currently have:

$ du -h /var/cache/pacman/pkg/
9.9G    /var/cache/pacman/pkg/

This goes back around 12 months or so. I consider that 10G a good insurance policy.

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P3808

Member

From: Austria

Registered: 2009-11-02

Posts: 28

Re: Old Package Repo?

look at www.schlunix.org/archlinux
there are old and current packages. If you want an old one, delete the new version, download the package-version you want and install it with pacman -U [package].pkg.tar.gz

grey

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-08-23

Posts: 679

Re: Old Package Repo?

There's a fairly comprehensive wiki entry for this: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Downgrade_packages . I recommend the Arch Rollback Machine.

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Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.