Suppose I want to upgrade a bunch of packages on a system, but in case the upgrade produces unexpected, undesired results, I want to be able to rollback the system to its original state. What is the best way to do that?
Often, I won't have, or be able to find, packages for the current installed versions. I.e. If I haven't upgraded postgres for 2 years, it may be that I can no longer find a package for the version I am currently running.
The 'rollback' feature of rpm and yum [1] looks promising, but I have a few concerns with it:
a) why isn't the --rolback switch described in either the man page for rpm or the output from --help? This makes me think the --rollback switch is deprecated or otherwise unofficial.
b) how can I trim/purge the 'repackaged' rpms that by default go in /var/spool/repackage [2]? I don't want to just leave them there forever, but if I trim/purge/delete them, how will the rpm database be updated to know that it can no longer rollback to the date that they were installed?
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[1] http://www.freedomit.co.nz/kb-centos/enabling-yum/rpm-rollback [2] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7034?page=0,1