Idea #2435: Go back to "last known good" configuration

194

Written by bsamwel the 2 Mar 08 at 10:19. Category: System.
Related to: Nothing/Others. Status: New

Description

When upgrading the daily alpha updates, I often get into a situation where the new packages don't work. For instance, I may get a kernel upgrade which breaks some driver that I need. Or I get a new bluez-utils package that suddenly doesn't recognize my bluetooth mouse, and I have to move heaven and earth to retrieve the previous version (e.g. bug 191704). My suggestion is that Ubuntu could remember a "last known good" package configuration which you can go back to. Perhaps caching all old config files of upgraded packages is possible as well, to make it all even more reliable, in case an upgrade modifies and breaks a config file.

Tags: (none)

Attachments

No attachments.

Duplicates

Idea #1875: Revert package upgrades (76 votes)

Idea #5785: last known good conf state works better than anything else. (36 votes)

[Report a duplicate and merge its votes to this idea]

Comments

squid0 wrote on the 2 Mar 08 at 10:48

This is massive.
It would make installing and upgrading of packages much safer. I suppose this is similar to Windows's rollback system (can't remember the exact term now).

Maybe you could manually set a 'good config point', or the system would make them automatically, either based on a time-period, or before any (major?) system change, similar to the way that xorg.conf gets backed up when you change it via dpkg-recofigure xserver-xorg.

Perhaps you could create, with the assistance of apt, good config points for only certain package trees, instead of the entire system at once. Using apt will help to know which packages depend on each other, both for updates and for reverts. For example, the kde-pim (kontact, kmail, akregator) package tree. Upon an unsatisfactory state after upgrade, you could simply revert that software 'tree' back to the last good state.

gijsterbeek wrote on the 15 Mar 08 at 23:55

It's quite simple:
After an update, just remember the previous versions of the packages that were updated the last 'apt-get upgrade'. Prepare a grub menu item that boots the kernel, runs a script to revert the last updates, and then boots again. The only nastiness would be that each update would require grub to be edited, which would take a few seconds more.

notyetroot wrote on the 15 Aug 08 at 17:05

I broke fglrx by enabling -proposed and -backports.
+1

Post your comment