[Opendnssec-develop] Supporting downgrades

[Jerry Lundström]

On Jul 13, 2012, at 12:14 , Sara (Sinodun) wrote:
> 
> On 12 Jul 2012, at 12:18, Rickard Bellgrim wrote:
> 
>>> The recent discussion on package contents has raised an interesting question - do we plan to provide migration scripts for users to downgrade between *major* versions e.g. 1.4.0 to 1.3.10. It does not appear that historically this has been done for previous releases.
>> 
>> Yes, that would be useful.


-1

We must realize there is a lot of work supporting downgrades and in most cases it can't be done since there is often new features with new major releases that don't exist in old releases.

With my 10+ years sysadmin hat on: it is not common practice to support major version downgrades or even do them, if there is a problem with a software even after testing you do a rollback to a backup of the old version.

Having said that, if there is consensus amount developers that this should be done then I feel it should be brought up on the next OpenDNSSEC Architectural Board meeting and decided on what level this should effect the project. It would most likely prolong releases and may impact on feature selection, can we implement features that can't be downgraded etc.

Regarding this very special case with 1.4.0a1 in EPEL; it is decided by OAB that distribution packaging should not be done within the project, that responsibility is on the maintainers shoulders. Maybe its time to revise that in order to gain more control over the packages and increase the quality of releases.

/Jerry

--
Jerry Lundström - OpenDNSSEC Developer
http://www.opendnssec.org/